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3Sp  Eopal  Corttsgo? 


JOHN   LA   FARGE.     Illustrated  with  photo- 
gravures. 

AUGUSTUS    SAINT-GAUD  ENS.  Illustrated 
with  photogravures. 

HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 
Boston  and  New  York 


JOHN  LA  FARGE 


LA  FARGE 


MEMOIR  AND  A  STUDY 


BY 

ROYAL  CORTISSOZ 


BOSTON  AND  NEW  YORK 
HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 
MDCCCCXI 


COPYRIGHT  I  9  I  I  BY  ROYAL  CORTISSOZ 
ALL  RIGHTS  RESERVED 

Publiihed  April  ign 


7HEJ.  PAUL  GETTY CENTfcK 
LIBRARY 


TO 

THE  MEMORY  OF 
JOHN  LA  FARGE 


PREFACE 


My  debt  to  the  subject  of  this  memoir  must 
on  every  page  be  apparent  to  the  reader,  but 
I  wish  here  to  make  formal  acknowledgment 
of  it.  Without  La  Farge's  aid  I  could  not  have 
made  my  study  biographical  as  well  as  critical. 
I  have  also  to  thank,  for  many  helpful  courte- 
sies, Miss  Grace  Edith  Barnes,  in  the  last  ten 
years  of  his  life  his  private  secretary  and  ap- 
pointed by  him  the  executrix  of  his  estate.  He 
made  her  familiar  with  much  in  his  career,  and 
the  light  she  has  thus  been  enabled  to  throw 
upon  it  has  been  generously  shared  with  me. 

I  am  under  obligation  to  Mr.  Henry  Adams 
for  material  of  great  importance,  embracing 
the  letters  addressed  to  him  from  which  I  have 
quoted,  the  notable  analysis  extracted  from 
his  privately  printed  "  Education  of  Henry 
Adams,"  and  some  further  reflections  on  his 
old  friend  and  fellow-traveller  in  Japan  and 
the  South  Seas.  Mr.  James  Huneker  has  been 
kind  enough  to  lend  me  a  sheaf  of  La  Farge's 
letters  to  him.  A  note  from  the  late  Augustus 
Saint-Gaudens  is  reproduced  by  the  permis- 
sion of  his  son,  Homer  Saint-Gaudens,  and  of 


C  viii  1 

the  Century  Company.  I  have  finally  to  thank 
the  editors  of  the  Century  Magazine  and  the 
New  Tork  Tribune  for  authority  to  make  use 
of  passages  of  my  own  previously  contributed 
to  their  respective  publications. 

Royal  Cortissoz. 

New  York,  February  1  o,  1911. 


* 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS 


I.  A  Study  for  a  Portrait  i 

II.  Ancestry  and  Early  Life  41 

III.  Europe  74 

IV.  The  Evolution  of  an  Artist  100 

V.  Half  a  Century  of  Painting  126 

VI.  Glass  183 
VII.  The  Old  Master  206 

Index  265 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


John  La  Farge  in  i860  Frontispiece 
From  a  daguerreotype. 

Paradise  Valley  24 

From  the  painting  in  the  possession  of  Gen.  Thorn- 
ton K.  Lothrop,  Boston. 

Sleeping  Woman  42 

From  the  early  painting  destroyed  by  fire. 

Wild  Roses  and  Water  Lily  56 

From  the  water-color  in  the  possession  of  M.  B.  Phil- 
ippe Esq.,  New  York. 

The  Three  Kings  74 

From  the  painting  in  the  possession  of  the  Museum 
of  Fine  Arts,  Boston. 

' '  Noli  Me  Tangere  ' '  80 

From  the  mural  painting  in  St.  Thomases  Church, 
New  York,  destroyed  by  fire.  {After  an  engraving 
by  C.A.  Powell) 

Christ  and  Nicodemus  90 
From  the  mural  painting  in  Trinity  Church,  Boston. 

John  La  Farge  in  1885  100 

From  a  photograph. 

The  Ascension  126 

From  the  mural  painting  in  the  Church  of  the  Ascen- 
sion, New  York.  Reproduced  from  a  photograph 
in  the  possession  of  Miss  Serena  Rhine  lander. 


Moses  receiving  the  Law  on  Mount  Sinai  150 

From  the  cartoon  for  the  mural  painting  in  the  Su- 
preme Court  Room  of  the  Capitol  at  St.  Paul,  Minn. 

The  Peacock  Window  184 
From  the  window  in  the  possession  of  the  Art  Mu- 
seum, Worcester y  Mass. 

Fruit  and  Flower  Garland  194 

From  the  decorative  panel  painted  in  wax. 

John  La  Faroe  in  1902  206 

From  the  portrait  by  Wilton  Lockwood. 

Waterfall  in  our  Garden  at  Nikko,  Japan  220 
From  the  water-color  in  the  possession  ofH.  P.  Whit- 
ney, Esq.,  New  York. 

Official  Presentation  of  Glfts  of  Food  — 
Samoa  242 

From,  the  wash  drawing. 

Reproduced  and  somewhat  enlarged  upon  the  cover  is  the 
seal  designed  by  Rizio  Awokifor  fohn  La  Farge  and 
cut  in  ivory  for  him  when  he  was  in  fapan 
in  1 886.   It  embodies  his  surname  in 
fapanese  characters. 


JOHN  LA  FARGE 


I 

A  STUDY  FOR  A 
PORTRAIT 

IT  was  a  characteristic  of  John  La  Farge 
that  he  had  a  distaste  for  the  promiscuous 
shaking  of  hands.  Something  in  him  shrank 
with  almost  feminine  sensitiveness  from  all 
personal  contacts,  and  he  was  amusingly  adroit 
in  evading  the  particular  one  to  which  the  or- 
dinary friendly  human  being  is  addicted.  No 
visitor  was  ever  allowed  to  guess  that  his  well- 
meant  salutation  had  been  amiably  frustrated. 
He  simply  found  La  Farge  with  a  brush  in 
one  hand  and  a  handkerchief  in  the  other,  and 
to  dispense  with  the  usual  mode  of  greeting 
seemed,  of  course,  the  most  natural  thing  in 
the  world.  Fate  made  La  Farge  an  artist.  By 
the  slightest  change  of  whim  she  might  have 
made  him  a  diplomat.  In  that  case  he  would 
have  distinguished  himself,  above  all,  by  sav- 
ing his  government  from  everything  that 
looked  like  coercion.  He  had  a  gift  for  the 
avoidance  of  those  things  that  he  did  not  want 
to  do. 


C  2  3 

The  trait  testified  to  neither  obstinacy  nor 
a  want  of  sympathy  for  others.  It  denoted, 
rather,  a  fastidiousness,  which,  with  an  idomi- 
table  individuality,  made  him  an  artist  — and 
a  very  exacting  one  —  in  whatever  concerned 
himself.  The  ego  in  him  was  intense,  and, 
though  swathed  in  the  silken  folds  of  an  old- 
world  courtesy,  it  stood  implacably  upon  its 
rights.  This  very  aloofness  of  his,  these  very 
reserves  which  counted  so  heavily  in  the  order- 
ing of  his  life,  have  proved,  on  the  other  hand, 
of  service  to  his  biographer.   La  Farge's  re- 
spect for  himself  is  intertwined,  for  me,  with 
his  respect  for  his  art  and  for  the  artistic 
history  which  he  knew,  as  a  man  of  his  ge- 
nius could  not  but  know,  he  had  helped  to 
make.  I  remember  visiting  an  exhibition  of 
his  and  receiving  from  him  the  next  day  a  re- 
quest that  I  would  go  and  look  at  it  again.  "  I 
have  had  the  distressing  red  carpet  covered 
with  a  white  gray  crash,"  he  said,  "  all  I  could 
find  in  the  hurry,  but  even  that  improves  the 
color  and  tone  to  such  an  extent  as  to  make  it 
look  differently  to  me.  At  least  most  of  the  red 
glare  is  off?'  The  anxiety  which  an  artist  feels 
for  the  proper  presentation  of  his  work  was 
ever  wakeful  in  La  Farge.  If  he  wanted  to 


C  3  3 

show  you  a  picture  in  his  studio  he  would  make 
sure  of  the  hour  of  the  day  providing  just  the 
right  light  or  he  would  not  show  it  at  all.  These 
precautions,  bearing  upon  the  business  of  the 
moment,  were  redoubled  in  behalf  of  anything 
that  bore  upon  the  future.  Whenever  it  was  a 
question  of  establishing  on  firm  ground  the 
record  of  a  specific  episode,  all  those  reserves  at 
which  I  have  glanced  fell  away  and  he  was  the 
willing  aid  of  his  interlocutor.  I  was  always 
writing  about  his  work,  and  in  our  purely  pro- 
fessional relations  he  was  as  helpful  as  he  was 
punctilious.  Upon  the  freedom  of  the  critic  he 
would  have  scorned  to  impose  so  much  as  a 
feather's  weight  of  restraint.  In  matters  of 
opinion  his  open-mindednessknewno  bounds. 
But  in  matters  of  fact  it  seemed  to  him  impor- 
tant to  get  the  details  straight  in  even  the  brief- 
est and  most  fugitive  of  chapters.  It  was  to  this 
solicitude  for  authenticity  of  statement  that  I 
was  indebted,  through  many  years,  for  invalu- 
able communications. 

One  of  these,  dating  from  a  time  when  I  was 
preparing  a  survey  of  his  career,  began  with  a 
recollection  of  something  he  had  read  in  a  book 
by  John  Oliver  Hobbes,  "that  very  intelligent 
woman,  so  American  and  so  « awfully'  Euro- 


C  4  3 

pean,,,  as  he  called  her.  He  had  forgotten  her 
exact  words,  but  their  meaning,  "though  bet- 
ter expressed,"  was  more  or  less  as  follows: 
"That  the  career  of  an  artist,  as  we  see  it, 
might  be  the  expression  of  his  professional 
intentions  or  else  a  record  of  his  personal  de- 
velopment, of  which  the  works  of  art  would 
merely  be  the  external  indication.' '  This 
seemed  to  him  worth  noting,  he  said,  "  even 
if  it  has  nothing  to  do  with  what  you  and  I  are 
concerned  in."  Looking  to  the  personal  ques- 
tion actually  between  us,  the  question  of  his 
own  career,  he  prefaced  a  long  analysis  of  his 
experience  in  the  painting  of  landscape  with 
these  words :  — 

"  I  have,  of  course,  no  idea  of  how  you  are 
going  to  handle  the  facts  of  my  life  as  an  artist, 
externally  or  internally.  What  I  am  anxious 
about  is  to  tell  you  what  I  know,  and  what  I 
think,  of  certain  things  I  have  done.  Whether 
they  are  known  or  appear  to  others  as  they  do 
to  me  is  another  matter.  The  mere  facts,  how- 
ever, are  matters  of  date  or  of  record,  and  are 
not  things  of  appreciation  except  in  the  sense 
of  gauging  their  importance.  In  the  different 
cases  of  a  good  deal  of  my  work  these  points 
of  how  and  why  I  came  to  do  a  thing  are  im- 


C  5  3 

portant  to  me  because  they  are  usually  unre- 
lated to  anything  being  done  outside  at  that 
time." 

The  drift  of  this  passage  explains  why  it  is 
worth  while,  and,  in  fact,  helpful  to  a  clearer 
understanding  of  LaFarge's  character,  for  me 
to  describe  in  some  detail  the  origin  of  this 
volume.  He  wished  to  write  his  reminiscences 
and  made  fitful  attempts  to  do  so,  but  ill-health 
handicapped  him,  and  constantly,  when  he  had 
the  energy  and  was  in  the  mood,  his  work  as 
an  artist  enforced  the  first  claim.  Several  years 
ago  it  occurred  to  me  to  bring  together  much 
of  the  criticism  which  I  had  devoted  to  his 
work,  and  he  received  the  idea  with  cordial 
sympathy.  I  told  him  that  for  such  a  mono- 
graph certain  biographical  details  were  essen- 
tial, and  he  cheerfully  agreed  to  put  them  in 
my  hands.  As  time  went  on  he  developed  an 
intense  interest  in  the  book,  coming  to  regard 
it  as  a  kind  of  repository  for  the  recollections 
and  reflections  which,  in  other  circumstances, 
he  might  have  embodied  in  a  book  of  his  own. 
We  had  been  close  friends  for  some  twenty 
years  and  there  was  a  perfect  trust  between 
us.  He  gave  me  freely  what  he  had  already 
put  into  manuscript,  and  continued  to  write,  as 


C  6  3 

he  had  written  in  other  times,  memories  of 
his  life  and  his  practice  as  an  artist  for  me  to 
use. 

When  something  recurred  to  him  that  he 
thought  belonged  to  the  narrative  he  would 
send  it  to  me  in  a  letter,  or  I  would  receive  a 
message  like  this :  "  Perhaps  to-morrow,  at 
some  off  hour,  you  might  be  tempted  to  come 
and  be  surprised,  and  perhaps  entertained,  by 
a  little  story  I  have  to  tell.  It 's  queer,  and 
worth  turning  out  of  one's  way  for.  I  thought 
of  Sunday,  because  it  is  labelled  a  day  of  rest. 
I  forgot  that  such  people  as  you  or  I  may 
choose  that  day  otherwise/'  In  another  note 
he  remarks,  apropos  of  our  meeting  soon 
thereafter,  that  he  perhaps  will  have  to  tell 
me  "some  more  curiosities/'  and  in  still  an- 
other he  says,  "I  had  an  absurdity  on  my  mind 
which  will  keep  many  days."  As  his  interest 
grew,  and  the  book  took  on  more  and  more  of 
the  character  of  a  record,  he  showed  me  more 
and  more  of  the  helpfulness  and  even  anxiety 
of  a  collaborator.  Once,  when  I  had  been  too 
absorbed  in  other  duties  to  go  on  with  the  task, 
he  wrote  saying,  "  I  have  no  news  ever  from 
you.  Evidently  you  are  not  writing  up  my 
life."  Nevertheless  we  found  many  occasions 


C  v  3 

to  sit  down  together  for  conversations,  lasting 
far  into  the  night,  of  which  it  was  understood 
between  us  that  I  would  afterwards  take  such 
notes  as  memory  made  possible.  Those  were 
happy  evenings,  continued  assiduously  until 
by  and  by  illness  brought  them  to  an  end. 
Presently,  too,  from  the  same  cause,  our  meet- 
ings by  daylight  were  given  more  to  casual 
talk  than  to  the  reconstruction  of  old  times  and 
scenes.  But  that  historical  sense  of  his  to  which 
I  referred  at  the  outset  never  left  him,  and 
down  to  the  end  his  letters  carried  on  the 
thread  of  our  subject,  or  spoke  of  further  pas- 
sages that  he  had  planned.  In  one  of  them, 
dating  from  his  last  illness,  he  says,  "  I  intend 
writing  you  a  long,  long  screed  to  continue  the 
autobiography  of  which  you  are  to  make  a 
'Biograph.'  ...  I  still  hope  to  see  you  some 
day,"  and  only  a  few  weeks  before  his  death 
he  wrote  me  again,  thus:  "I  must  answer 
your  letter  in  full,  there  is  so  much  to  take  up, 
both  for  us  here  and  for  the  record  abroad. 
But  it  is  only  to-day  that  I  see  a  chance  to  get 
a  stenographer  for  dictation  and  then  you  will 
be  deluged." 

The  deluge  never  came.  There  was  rest, 
instead,  for  that  kindling  brain  and  that  inde- 


m 

[  8  ] 

fatigable  hand.  From  the  citations  I  have  made 
the  reader  will  understand  my  desire  to  use 
in  the  following  pages,  wherever  possible, 
La  Farge's  words,  rather  than  my  own,  and 
he  will  realize,  too,  the  peculiar  sense  of  re- 
sponsibility with  which  I  have  undertaken  to 
carry  out  my  task.  This  book  is,  in  some  sort, 
the  fulfilment  of  a  purpose  shared  by  La  Farge 
and  myself.  The  reader  who  suspects  that  it 
has  been  written  in  affection  will  not  be  far 
wrong.  From  the  exaggerations  of  uncritical 
hero-worship  biographers  sometimes  go  to  the 
other  extreme,  and,  out  of  a  solemnly  ex- 
pressed respect  for  "the  verdict  of  posterity," 
hesitate  to  give  free  play  to  the  faith  that  is 
in  them.  Doubtless  this  is  judicious,  but  doubt- 
less, too,  it  smacks  a  little  of  evasion.  I  am 
abundantly  aware  that  I  have  no  business  with 
the  verdict  of  posterity,  but  of  one  thing  I  am 
convinced,  and  that  is  that  La  Farge  was  a 
great  artist,  and,  into  the  bargain,  a  man  to 
love.  It  was  my  good  fortune  to  know  him 
intimately  for  a  long  period  and  to  be  with 
him  often,  alone,  in  talk  which  knew  no  bar- 
riers. Our  friendship  was  never  even  momen- 
tarily disturbed  by  so  much  as  the  shadow  of 
a  shadow.  It  is  with  grateful  loyalty  to  a  be- 


[  9  3 

loved  master  in  the  things  of  the  mind  that  I 
have  sought  to  draw  his  portrait. 

It  is  at  this  stage  of  my  undertaking  that 
I  wish  I  could  achieve  the  impossible,  and,  as 
a  preliminary  toward  the  recital  of  many  of 
La  Farge's  own  sayings,  so  paint  him  that  the 
reader  might  see  and  hear  him.  The  charm  of 
La  Farge  was  prodigiously  heightened  by  the 
originality  and  distinction  of  his  countenance, 
the  vividness  of  the  appeal  made  through  his 
carriage,  his  typical  gestures,  and  a  quiet  but 
curiously  rich  and  characterful  voice.  He  had 
the  thinker's  skull,  amply  domed,  and  his  dark 
brown  hair,  extraordinarily  fine  and  silky,  re- 
tained its  color  long  after  age  had  set  its  mark 
upon  him.  In  fact,  it  was  only  very  late,  when 
he  had  entered  upon  the  final  struggle  with 
illness,  that  the  graying  of  his  hair  became 
noticeable.  His  features  both  harmonized  with 
the  pure  structure  of  his  head  and  gave  it  ele- 
ments of  strangeness,  like  the  accents  placed 
here  and  there  by  genius  in  a  great  sculptured 
portrait.  The  nose  was  long,  straight,  and  pow- 
erful, with  nostrils  well  curved,  delicate  in 
texture,  very  firmly  defined,  the  nose  of  a 
man  of  breeding.  It  descended  from  between 
strongly  marked  brows,  which,  with  the  fine 


C  10  3 

green-gray  eyes,  gave  the  face  its  most  arrest- 
ing note  of  individuality,  though  the  ears,  too, 
large  and  beautifully  set,  were  full  of  char- 
acter. His  eyes  were  generously  lidded  and 
seemed  to  come  forward  from  their  big,  deep 
sockets  with  a  rounded  weightiness  again  sug- 
gesting a  statue.  They  were  opened  wide  in 
moments  of  astonishment,  of  indignation  and 
irony,  but  I  chiefly  remember  them  peering 
through  half-closed  lids  and  expressive  of  re- 
flection, of  brooding  enquiry.  The  straightly 
drawn  mouth,  with  lips  that  were  firm  but 
could  be  very  mobile,  and  the  solid  chin  spoke 
of  determination,  authority,  and  an  unshakable 
self-confidence.  His  skin  was  close-grained 
and  smooth,  with  a  soft  warmth  of  tint  difficult 
to  describe,  for  it  partook  of  the  olive  hue  of 
the  Southern  Latin  races  and  of  that  quality, 
suggestive  of  wax  or  of  parchment,  which  you 
will  often  find  in  the  scholar  of  any  clime.  His 
was  one  of  those  complexions  which  seem,  in 
fact,  to  take  their  subdued  richness  of  color 
from  an  inner,  spiritual  glow. 

He  was  a  man  of  good  height,  though  lat- 
terly a  stooping  habit  withdrew  attention  from 
the  fact  that  he  was  full  six  feet  tall,  as  it  like- 
wise disguised  his  possession  of  an  unusually 


C  11  1 

deep  chest.  His  feet  were  small  and  well 
formed,  long  and  slender,  like  his  hands,  and 
those,  with  their  aristocratic  fingers,  were  the 
hands  of  an  artist  in  the  fullest  sense  of  the 
traditional  phrase.  His  figure  left  an  impres- 
sion of  leanness,  until  you  came  to  observe  its 
good  proportions  and  to  realize  that  he  was  not 
what  is  usually  called  a  bony  type,  but  simply 
a  man  whose  laborious  and  refined  habit  of 
life  had  naturally  kept  him  in  spare  condition. 
Refinement  in  its  very  essence  was  subtly  pro- 
claimed in  all  the  details  of  his  appearance  and 
in  all  his  little  idiosyncrasies.  I  saw  him,  occa- 
sionally, in  other  colors,  in  gray  or  in  brown, 
but  as  a  rule  he  is  associated  in  my  mind  with 
black.  Whatever  he  wore  testified  to  an  in- 
tense fastidiousness.  Linen  and  silk  could  not 
be  of  too  fine  a  texture  for  him.  He  lived 
softly,  as  the  saying  goes,  not  from  an  indo- 
lent or  sensuous  taste,  but  because  the  artist 
in  him  rebelled  against  the  second  best  or  the 
thing  rough  to  the  touch.  He  would  be  as  ex- 
acting about  his  handkerchiefs,  say,  as  about 
the  implements  on  his  painting  table,  or  the 
Japanese  paper  on  which  he  made  so  many 
of  his  drawings.  His  garments  were  like  his 
demeanor,  unthought  of  by  him,  in  a  sense, 


1 1*  1 

but  part  of  his  belief  that  life  should  be  gra- 
cious and  dignified,  neat,  well  ordered,  and 
always  protected,  somehow,  from  careless- 
ness and  disrespect.  And  never  for  an  instant 
did  his  conformity  to  a  severe  standard  of  taste 
chill  or  otherwise  overpower  his  sheer  delight- 
fulness. 

The  photograph  of  him  which  serves  as  a 
frontispiece  to  this  volume  shows  how  hand- 
some, handsome  indeed  to  the  point  of  fasci- 
nation, he  was  in  his  youth.  My  friend,  the 
late  Katharine  Prescott  Wormeley,  the  trans- 
lator of  Balzac,  knew  him  well  in  old  Newport 
days,  and,  telling  me  how  interesting  he  then 
was,  she  laid  stress  upon  the  fact  that  he  was 
notably  picturesque.  He  was  always  that,  but 
in  his  prime,  when  I  first  knew  him,  with  the 
picturesqueness  softened  and  given  as  it  were 
a  rich  reposeful  tone,  by  something  subtly  pre- 
latical.  The  first  time  I  ever  dined  with  him, 
long  ago,  we  sat  alone  at  one  of  the  vast  tables 
in  the  old  Brevoort  House,  taken  care  of  by  a 
waiter  whose  sedateness  and  efficiency  marked 
him  as  an  embodiment  of  the  tradition  of  that 
once  famous  hotel.  La  Farge  fitted  beautifully 
into  that  old  "  Washington  Square  "  picture,  a 
type  of  our  older  regime,  the  calm,  authorita- 


C  is  ] 

tive  and  exquisitely  urbane  man  of  the  world. 
But  even  then  I  saw  his  ceremonious  habit 
tempered  and  lightened  by  the  franchise  of  the 
artist;  and,  only  a  few  evenings  later,  I  had  a 
deeper  initiation  into  his  charm  when,  in  the 
big  shadowy  studio  he  had  for  half  a  century 
in  the  old  Tenth  Street  building,  we  discussed 
by  candle  light  a  meal  improvised  on  one  of 
the  working  tables  by  his  Japanese  retainer. 
Then  I  saw  better  how  La  Farge  was,  what  I 
always  found  him  thereafter  down  to  the  day 
of  his  death,  a  blend  of  entirely  mundane  so- 
phistication with  the  easy,  informal,  lovable 
traits  of  a  man  so  whole-heartedly  given  to 
artistic  and  intellectual  things  that,  while  he 
valued  forms  and  conventions  and  could  not 
do  without  them,  he  could  not  for  the  life  of 
him  overestimate  their  importance.  When  he 
had  shown  you  the  necessary  courtesies  he 
settled  down  to  talk,  and  in  place  of  the  tone 
of  the  drawing-room  he  gave  you  that  which 
belongs  to  the  romantic  world  of  art. 

I  have  heard  some  brilliant  talkers,  Whist- 
ler amongst  them,  but  I  have  never  heard  one 
even  remotely  comparable  to  La  Farge.  He 
knew  nothing  of  the  glittering,  phrase-making 
habit  of  the  merely  clever  man,  to  wThom  the 


C  14  ] 

condensation  of  a  bit  of  repartee  into  an  epi- 
gram is  a  triumph.  "I  am  not  a  clever  man," 
he  once  said  to  me, «  but  sometimes  I  do  clever 
things.  I  think  when  that  happens  it  is  the 
work  of  the  daemon  of  Socrates.,,  He  gave 
me  a  droll  instance.  He  was  dictating  to  a 
typewriter  who  made  a  mess  of  the  names  of 
some  Chinese  gods.  "Like  a  flash  I  said  to  her, 
'Miss  X.,  you  have  put  in  here  the  name  of 
your  best  man/  She  blushed  violently  and  ad- 
mitted it.' '  He  paused.  "  They  often  do  that/ ' 
he  added,  with  one  of  his  understanding  smiles. 
There  were  often,  by  the  way,  such  flashes  of 
innocent  fun  as  this  in  his  conversation,  but 
he  held  you,  of  course,  on  a  far  higher  plane. 
There  he  practised  a  serene  eloquence,  ranging 
over  fields  so  spacious  that  in  addition  to  the 
weighty  substance  of  his  talk  he  stimulated 
the  listener  as  with  a  sense  of  large  issues,  of 
brave  venturings  into  seas  of  thought.  He  had 
seen  the  world,  he  had  known  a  multitude  of 
men  and  things,  and  this  rich  experience  re- 
acted upon  his  nature.  But  his  complexity  was 
a  central  possession,  it  was  of  the  very  texture 
of  his  soul.  There  went  with  it,  too,  a  pecu- 
liar poise,  a  strange,  self-centred  calm.  His 
pronounced  sympathy  for  the  East  was  easily 


C  15  3 

understood.  He  liked  its  attitude  of  contem- 
plation. His  own  habit  was  meditative.  But 
where  his  individuality  made  a  still  further 
claim  was  in  the  direction  of  a  tremendous  in- 
tellectual and  spiritual  activity. 

To  sit  with  him  in  fervid  talk  on  a  thousand 
things  was  to  feel,  presently,  that  he  flung  out 
a  myriad  invisible  tentacles  of  understanding, 
electric  filaments  which  in  an  instant  identified 
him  with  the  subject  of  his  thought  and  made 
him  free  of  its  innermost  secrets.  And  what  he 
gathered  through  these  magical  processes  he 
brought  back  and  put  before  you,  slowly,  with 
an  almost  oracular  deliberation,  but  in  such 
living  words  and  with  such  an  artistic  balanc- 
ing of  his  periods  that  you  saw  what  he  saw, 
felt  what  he  felt,  and  waited  in  positively  tense 
enjoyment  for  the  unfolding  of  the  next  men- 
tal picture.  I  have  spoken  of  his  periods.  The 
phrase  is,  perhaps,  not  quite  exact,  for  a  sen- 
tence of  LaFarge's  might  carry  you  almost 
anywhere  before  arriving  at  its  goal.  The  goal 
was  always  reached.  The  certainty  of  that 
consummation  was  one  more  of  his  spells.  You 
watched  and  waited  in  absolute  security  but 
sometimes  a  little  breathlessly,  for  La  Farge 
was  a  past  master  of  the  parenthesis  and  he 


C  16  ] 

hated  to  let  go  of  his  collateral  lines  of  thought. 
It  was  as  though  he  glanced  wistfully  at  them, 
as  at  ripples  in  the  wake  of  his  leading  motive, 
and  grudged  their  loss.  There  were  moments 
when  he  would  pause  to  recapture  them. 
There  were  others  when,  with  a  smile,  he  let 
them  fade,  as  one  who  would  say,  whimsically, 
" We  could  have  got  some  profitable  varia- 
tions out  of  that  theme.' ' 

What  he  said  was  inspiring,  but  there  was 
an  added  stimulus  for  the  listener  in  this  con- 
versational mode  of  his  ;  by  itself  it  fostered 
liberal  thought  and  especially  gave  you  the 
warm  and  thrilling  sensation  of  being  in  the 
presence  of  pure  genius.  It  is  the  singularity 
of  that  genius  that  I  am  particularly  anxious 
to  enforce  and  hence  I  am  glad  to  be  permit- 
ted to  quote  the  finest  analysis  of  it  that  I 
know.  This  was  written  by  Mr.  Henry  Ad- 
ams, the  historian,  with  whom  La  Farge  made 
his  Japanese  and  South  Sea  journeys.  It  occurs 
in  "  The  Education  of  Henry  Adams,"  the 
work  which  the  author  wrote  in  the  third  per- 
son. Thus  it  runs  :  — 

"  Of  all  the  men  who  had  deeply  affected 
their  friends  since  1850  John  La  Farge  was 
certainly  the  foremost,  and  for  Henry  Adams, 


t  »7  ] 

who  had  sat  at  his  feet  since  1872,  the  ques- 
tion how  much  he  owed  to  La  Farge  could  be 
answered  only  by  admitting  that  he  had  no 
standard  to  measure  it  by.  Of  all  his  friends 
La  Farge  alone  owned  a  mind  complex  enough 
to  contrast  against  the  commonplaces  of 
American  uniformity,  and  in  the  process  had 
vastly  perplexed  most  Americans  who  came 
in  contact  with  it.  The  American  mind,  —  the 
Bostonian  as  well  as  the  Southern  or  Western, 
—  likes  to  walk  straight  up  to  its  object,  and 
assert  or  deny  something  that  it  takes  for  a 
fact ;  it  has  a  conventional  approach,  a  con- 
ventional analysis,  and  a  conventional  conclu- 
sion, as  well  as  a  conventional  expression,  all 
the  time  loudly  asserting  its  unconvention- 
ally. The  most  disconcerting  trait  of  John 
La  Farge  was  his  reversal  of  the  process.  His 
approach  was  quiet  and  indirect ;  he  moved 
round  an  object,  and  never  separated  it  from 
its  surroundings ;  he  prided  himself  on  faith- 
fulness to  tradition  and  convention ;  he  was 
never  abrupt  and  abhorred  dispute.  His  man- 
ners and  attitude  towards  the  universe  were 
the  same,  whether  tossing  in  the  middle  of 
the  Pacific  Ocean  sketching  the  trade- wind 
from  a  whale-boat  in  the  blast  of  sea-sickness, 


[  18  ] 

or  drinking  the  cha-no-yu  in  the  formal  rites 
of  Japan,  or  sipping  his  cocoa-nut  cup  of  Kava 
in  the  ceremonial  of  Samoan  chiefs,  or  reflect- 
ing under  the  sacred  bo-tree  at  Anaradjpura. 

"One  was  never  quite  sure  of  his  whole 
meaning  until  too  late  to  respond,  for  he  had 
no  difficulty  in  carrying  different  shades  of 
contradiction  in  his  mind.  As  he  said  of  his 
friend  Okakura,  his  thought  ran  as  a  stream 
runs  through  grass,  hidden  perhaps  but  al- 
ways there ;  and  one  felt  often  uncertain  in 
what  direction  it  flowed,  for  even  a  contradic- 
tion was  to  him  only  a  shade  of  difference,  a 
complementary  color,  about  which  no  intelli- 
gent artist  would  dispute.  Constantly  he  re- 
pulsed argument: —  'Adams,  you  reason  too 
much ! '  was  one  of  his  standing  reproaches 
even  in  the  mild  discussion  of  rice  and  man- 
goes in  the  warm  night  of  Tahiti  dinners.  He 
should  have  blamed  Adams  for  being  born  in 
Boston.  The  mind  resorts  to  reason  for  want 
of  training,  and  Adams  had  never  met  a  per- 
fectly trained  mind. 

"To  La  Farge,  eccentricity  meant  conven- 
tion ;  a  mind  really  eccentric  never  betrayed 
it.  True  eccentricity  was  a  tone,  —  a  shade, 
—  a  nuance,  —  and  the  finer  the  tone,  the 


i  19  1 

truer  the  eccentricity.  Of  course  all  artists 
hold  more  or  less  the  same  point  of  view  in 
their  art,  but  few  carry  it  into  daily  life,  and 
often  the  contrast  is  excessive  between  their 
art  and  their  talk.  One  evening  Humphreys 
Johnston,  who  was  devoted  to  La  Farge, 
asked  him  to  meet  Whistler  at  dinner.  La 
Farge  was  ill,  —  more  ill  than  usual  even  for 
him, — but  he  admired  and  liked  Whistler 
and  insisted  on  going.  By  chance,  Adams  was 
so  placed  as  to  overhear  the  conversation  of 
both,  and  had  no  choice  but  to  hear  that  of 
Whistler,  which  engrossed  the  table.  At  that 
moment  the  Boer  war  was  raging,  and,  as 
every  one  knows,  on  that  subject  Whistler 
raged  worse  than  the  Boers.  For  two  hours 
he  declaimed  against  England,  —  witty,  de- 
clamatory, extravagant,  bitter,  amusing  and 
noisy ;  but  in  substance  what  he  said  was  not 
merely  commonplace,  —  it  was  true !  That  is 
to  say,  his  hearers,  including  Adams  and,  as 
far  as  he  knew,  La  Farge,  agreed  with  it  all, 
and  mostly  as  a  matter  of  course;  yet  La 
Farge  was  silent,  and  this  difference  of  ex- 
pression was  a  difference  of  art.  Whistler  in 
his  art  carried  the  sense  of  nuance  and  tone  far 
beyond  any  point  reached  by  La  Farge,  or 


C  20  3 

even  attempted ;  but  in  talk  he  showed,  above 
or  below  his  color-instinct,  a  willingness  to 
seem  eccentric  where  no  real  eccentricity,  un- 
less perhaps  of  temper,  existed. 

«  This  vehemence,  which  Whistler  never 
betrayed  in  his  painting,  La  Farge  seemed  to 
lavish  on  his  glass.  ...  In  conversation  La 
Farge's  mind  was  opaline  with  infinite  shades 
and  refractions  of  light,  and  with  color  toned 
down  to  the  finest  gradations.  In  glass  it  was 
insubordinate ;  it  was  renaissance ;  it  asserted 
his  personal  force  with  depth  and  vehemence 
of  tone  never  before  seen.  He  seemed  bent 
on  crushing  rivalry/ ' 

The  "infinite  shades  and  refractions  of 
light"  which  Mr.  Adams  describes  had  the 
effect  of  etching  upon  the  hearer's  mind  pic- 
tures of  a  phenomenal  completeness  and  vivid- 
ness. La  Farge  had  the  power  of  the  necro- 
mancer to  take  you,  as  though  on  a  carpet  out 
of  the  "Arabian  Nights,"  away  from  the  world 
of  prose  into  one  of  thought  and  beauty.  An 
instance  salient  amongst  my  recollections  is 
connected  with  the  opening  of  the  Saint-Gau- 
dens  memorial  exhibition,  at  the  Metropolitan 
Museum  in  New  York,  one  night  in  March, 
1908.  He  and  the  sculptor  had  been  life-long 


C  21  3 

friends  and  he  had  an  affectionate  desire  to 
pay  him  the  tribute  of  sharing  in  this  formal 
observance,  but  he  was  not  well  and  shrank 
from  going  alone.  We  went  together.  On  the 
way  there  in  a  cab  he  told  me,  apropos  of  his 
walking  stick,  which  had  been  cut  for  him  by 
a  cannibal  chief,  some  of  his  memories  of  the 
Fiji  Islands.  He  was  struck  by  the  queer  mix- 
ture there  of  civilized  and  barbaric  traits. 
Speaking  of  the  good  breeding  of  the  natives 
he  described  the  resemblance  of  some  of  them 
to  the  well-set-up,  hard  clubman  of  New  York 
or  London,  who  looks  after  himself  with  un- 
abashed selfishness  but  in  a  gentlemanly  way. 
He  told  me  how  he  and  his  companion  upon 
those  South  Sea  travels  rejoiced  over  the  re- 
port of  the  British  Governor,  who,  on  a  cer- 
tain occasion,  was  accepting  the  submission 
of  the  chiefs.  This  functionary  was  not  alto- 
gether sure  about  giving  his  countenance  to 
one  member  of  the  company,  for,  he  said, 
<6  He  is  not  a  gentleman."  "  It  was  so  per- 
fectly true/'  said  La  Farge,  and  went  on  in  an 
analysis  of  the  barbaric  character  so  entranc- 
ing that  our  arrival  at  the  Museum  induced  a 
kind  of  shock. 

He  was  enormously  interested  and  pleased 


[  22  3 

with  what  he  found  there  —  and  very  amus- 
ing on  the  beauty  of  "the  living  sculpture' ' 
which  filled  the  great  hall  —  but  after  he  had 
held  court  for  a  little  while,  talking  with  the 
people  he  knew,  we  came  away.  What  im- 
pressed me  about  the  whole  episode  was  its 
note  of  dedication  to  a  cherished  friend.  Ill 
and  tired  as  he  was,  he  had  by  his  presence 
given  testimony  to  the  faithfulness  with  which 
he  held  the  memory  of  Saint-Gaudens  in  his 
heart.  It  was  late  by  the  time  we  had  found 
our  cab ;  but  for  talk  it  was  as  though  the 
night  had  only  just  begun,  and  all  the  way 
home  I  listened  to  probably  the  most  remark- 
able piece  of  easy,  natural,  but  truly  inspir- 
ing eloquence  the  gods  could  ever  give  me. 
It  was  discursive,  as  usual,  infinitely  paren- 
thetical, but  it  possessed  that  unity  which,  as 
I  have  said,  he  always  secured.  He  told  me 
about  a  journey  made  by  his  friend  Okakura 
in  the  East,  a  visit  to  an  historic  Chinese  mon- 
astery far  from  cities.  The  traveller  was  wel- 
comed in  a  bare  little  room  by  a  priest  who 
sat  down  upon  the  floor  to  a  stringed  instru- 
ment and  spoke,  as  it  were,  through  its  music. 
Then  followed  different  ceremonies,  which 
were  somehow  made  as  real  to  me  as  obser- 


C  23  ^ 

varices  in  a  Western  church ;  after  that  came 
the  count  of  Okakura's  full  days,  the  priestly 
farewell,  spoken  again  in  music,  and,  at  last, 
the  sacramental  bowl  lifted  to  the  lips  of  the 
speeding  guest  under  an  ancient  tree  some 
distance  from  the  monastery.  In  the  night 
outside  our  cab  the  noises  of  the  street  seemed 
to  sink  into  silence,  the  ranks  of  commonplace 
buildings  to  give  way  to  a  far  landscape,  and, 
literally,  I  seemed  to  hear  the  thin  notes  ris- 
ing from  beneath  the  mysterious  priest's  yel- 
low fingers.  Again,  at  La  Farge's  door,  one 
seemed  to  be  wakened  from  a  dream. 

I  should  be  leaving  my  tale  but  half  told 
if  I  failed  to  lay  stress  upon  the  fact  that  the 
compelling  glamour  of  La  Farge's  talk,  of 
these  reveries  made  articulate,  was  deepened 
by  the  character  of  his  physiognomy,  which, 
true  to  the  varied  impulses  of  his  being,  had 
the  power  to  stir  one,  in  different  times  and 
moods,  to  very  different  mental  associations. 
In  a  characteristic  attitude  of  earlier  years  he 
stays  in  my  memory  as  a  singularly  alert 
and  nervous  figure,  with  hands  thrust  in  his 
pockets,  head  jerked  back,  mouth  twisted, 
and  the  muscles  of  his  face  taut  as  he  stood 
round-eyed  with  comic  amazement  —  good- 


C  2*  3 

humoredly  astounded  at  the  eternal  banality 
of  things.  He  seemed  very  modern  then  and 
very  human.  Later,  when  he  had  begun  to  pay 
his  debt  to  time,  the  wonderfully  modelled 
head,  with  its  great  brow,  sank  a  little  between 
the  shoulders,  and,  as  he  burrowed  down  into 
a  big  chair  and  gloomed  gently  at  his  compan- 
ion through  the  rims  of  his  wide  spectacles,  he 
looked  like  some  majestic  dignitary  musing 
in  the  obscure  recesses  of  an  Oriental  temple. 
The  subdued  ivory  tint  which  distinguished 
his  complexion  in  his  old  age  especially  con- 
tributed to  this  impression,  and  then,  too,  his 
profound  passion  for  the  East  made  it  in  some 
inexplicable  fashion  the  easier  thus  to  visual- 
ize him.  Again  there  were  times  when  you  felt 
that  he  wore  the  mask  of  an  old  Italian  priest. 
In  the  Renaissance  he  would  have  been  a  Car- 
dinal statesman,  one  of  those  militant  princes 
of  the  Church  who  triumphed,  however,  by 
astuteness  rather  than  by  force  of  arms,  and 
Mantegna  would  have  rejoiced  to  paint  his 
portrait,  as  Pisanello  would  with  gladness 
have  made  his  rare  profile  immortal  within  the 
narrow  limits  of  a  medal.  The  impenetrability 
stamped  upon  his  face  would  only  have  made 
the  appeal  to  their  imagination  the  stronger. 


Paradise  Valley 


c  25  n 

A  habit  of  secretiveness,  when  it  is  not  ren- 
dered ignoble  by  relation  to  petty  things,  will 
put  a  patina  of  mystery  upon  the  personality 
of  a  man.  La  Farge,  who  wore  this  impalpable 
armor,  was  made  still  more  baffling  by  some- 
thing alien  and  exotic  in  his  nature.  His  ap- 
pearance denoted  subtle  alliances  with  things 
outside  our  everyday  life.  Beside  him  entirely 
admirable  people,  who  never  in  their  lives 
committed  a  solecism  and  had  brains  into  the 
bargain,  still  seemed  a  little  crude  and  flat.  I 
used  often  to  reflect  as  we  sat  talking  together 
that  his  being  in  New  York  at  all  was  an  in- 
congruity, a  sacrifice,  and  a  frustration.  He 
should  have  dwelt  in  Paris  and  spent  Olym- 
pian evenings  there,  discussing  monumental 
decorations  with  Puvis,  or  Italian  mysticism 
with  Gebhart,  or  Latin  literature  with  Bois- 
sier,  or  religious  origins  with  Renan  and  Salo- 
mon Reinach.  Best  of  all,  he  should  have  held 
endless  discourse  on  everything  under  the 
sun  with  that  "pawky  Benedictine' '  —  as  he 
himself  might  have  been  called  —  Anatole 
France.  He  should  have  been  another  Pierre 
Loti,  cosseted  by  the  State  and  sent  up  and 
down  the  world  in  a  warship  to  collect  sensa- 
tions. On  his  return,  as  he  donned  the  palm 


[  26  ] 

leaves  of  an  Academician  and  accepted  the 
greetings  of  respectfully  attentive  colleagues, 
he  would  have  interpreted  to  them  the  genius 
of  remote  peoples  with  an  insight  and  a  philo- 
sophic wisdom  of  which  Loti  never  dreamed. 

If  I  speak  of  him  as  a  spiritual  exile  it  is  not 
because  he  lacked,  here,  the  company  of  his 
peers.  A  man  who  could  hope  for  even  one 
encounter  in  a  year  or  two  with  a  friend  such 
as  Clarence  King,  for  example,  might  recon- 
cile himself  to  a  desert  island.  But  La  Farge 
needed  a  frame,  a  tradition,  an  environment 
part  and  parcel  of  the  sequence  of  civilization 
to  which  he  belonged.  With  his  work  to  do  he 
would  have  been  happy  anywhere,  and  he  was 
indubitably  happy  and  content  as  an  Ameri- 
can. Yet  the  spirit  of  old  Europe  or  that  of  the 
older  Orient  was  forever  pulling  at  his  heart- 
strings, and,  though  he  never  had  a  syllable 
of  complaint  to  make  about  his  destiny,  I  was 
often  conscious  of  an  unspoken  ruefulness  in 
him,  a  half-amused  wonder  as  to  whether, 
somewhere  else  in  the  world,  there  might  not 
be  springs  at  which  it  would  be  a  little  more 
satisfying  to  drink.  He  loved  his  country.  If 
shortsightedness  had  not  disqualified  him  he 
would  have  gone  to  the  front  in  the  Civil  War. 


C  27  3 

His  fellow  artists  know  with  what  generosity 
and  effectiveness  he  gave  himself  to  the  ad- 
vancement of  our  school.  Nevertheless  my 
sense  of  his  detachment  from  his  surroundings 
will  not  down.  For  all  his  interest  in  them, 
his  understanding  of  them,  and,  at  many 
points,  his  sympathy  for  them,  his  inner  life 
was  lived  in  a  singular  isolation. 

This  never  betrayed  his  sense  of  proportion. 
He  saw  life  and  himself  too  justly  for  that  and 
he  was  too  ready  to  smile  at  the  fatuity  of  any 
man's  imagining  that  he  was  too  big  for  his 
opportunity.  In  his  smile,  kindly  and  quizzi- 
cal, there  was,  before  all  else,  complete  com- 
prehension. His  humor  was  not  precisely 
saturnine,  but  it  was  very  subtile  and  a  little 
matin,  too  intellectualized  for  it  to  seem  the 
mere  gayety  of  the  ordinary  man  in  high  spir- 
its. He  practised  the  delicate  art  of  thinking 
as  constantly  and  as  naturally  as  he  breathed, 
and  this  gave  a  conscious  direction  to  even  the 
most  spontaneous  flashes  of  his  fun.  All  the 
relations  of  life  were  dramatized  in  that  quick 
brain  of  his,  so  swiftly,  and  with  so  far-reach- 
ing a  flair  for  their  last,  most  evanescent  re- 
verberations or  implications,  that  out  of  the 
smallest  episode  he  could  wring  shades  of  sen- 


sation  undreamed  of  by  another  observer  — 
or  by  the  victim  himself.  Every  word  uttered, 
every  letter  written,  every  move  made  in  the 
recondite  game  of  life,  though  not  long  medi- 
tated, had,  at  all  events,  its  sufficiently  pon- 
dered purpose.  He  never  discharged  an  arrow 
in  the  dark.  It  sometimes,  too,  reached  its 
mark  when  his  aim  seemed  most  casual. 

As  I  write  these  lines  I  realize  that  they 
need,  not  correction,  but  extension  into  that 
atmosphere  of  mere  human  friendliness  which 
robs  gravity  of  its  forbidding  aspect  and  turns 
an  eminent  man  into  an  endearing  companion. 
La  Farge  could  be,  in  his  wray,  jolly.  He  liked 
now  and  then  to  have  young  people  about  him 
and  to  laugh  with  them.  He  adored  "limer- 
icks," when  they  were  killingly  preposterous; 
and  if  he  knew  how  to  smile  with  consummate 
meaning  he  knew  also  how  to  chuckle,  a  gift 
with  which  cynicism  is  hardly  compatible.  Our 
evenings  together  might  be  never  so  absorb- 
ing in  the  seriousness  of  their  topics,  but  there 
was  always  room  in  them  for  mirth.  There 
was  an  old  joke  between  us  that  cigars  to  be 
good  must  be  large,  fat,  and  of  a  fairly  rich 
flavor.  I  would  receive  an  invitation  from  him, 
couched  in  his  never-failing  terms  of  eigh- 


C  ^  3 

teenth-century  courtesy,  as  in  one  summons 
to  a  new  apartment  he  had  taken  —  "  the  room 
is  clean,  that 's  one  thing,  not  much  else  in  its 
favor  except  your  coming  "  —  and  then  there 
would  be  the  familiar  allusion  to  the  tobacco 
without  which  a  symposium  was  supposed  to 
be  unthinkable.  "I  have  cigars,"  he  would 
write,  "decent  whiskey,  some  poor  cham- 
pagne, and  average  brandy  —  enough  to  put 
aside  a  few  moments/ \  We  soon  put  them 
aside.  With  meticulous  care  he  would  see  that 
all  was  in  order,  especially  the  matches,  and 
then,  in  clouds  of  smoke,  we  would  forget  the 
liquids.  Apropos  of  the  latter,  by  the  way,  he 
told  me  that  only  once  in  his  life  had  his  taste 
in  wine  exceeded  his  discretion.  With  the  late 
Russell  Sturgis,  himself  a  seasoned  connois- 
seur, he  sat  down  to  enjoy  some  notable  Bur- 
gundies. The  feast  had  been  appointed  for  that 
purpose.  They  gave  their  minds  and  palates 
to  so  many  vintages  as  to  so  many  works  of 
art.  Their  heads  were  untouched.  Ideas  came 
only  the  more  speedily.  Conversation  had 
never  been  more  luminous  or  delightful.  But 
when,  with  immense  satisfaction  in  their  even- 
ing, the  diners  sought  to  rise,  their  legs  calmly 
refused  to  perform  their  accustomed  office. 


C  so  3 

That  was  all  that  had  happened,  and  that, 
though  temporarily  embarrassing,  was  inor- 
dinately funny.  The  mere  memory  of  the  in- 
cident was  a  source  of  huge  amusement  to  La 
Farge. 

There  was  one  trait  of  his  into  which  all  the 
rest  were  gathered  up,  his  love  of  his  work ; 
and  what  a  tremendous  driving  force  it  was 
may  be  seen  the  more  clearly  if  we  consider 
the  heavy  handicap  of  ill  health  that  he  car- 
ried. In  his  letters  there  are  constant  allusions 
to  this  subject.  As  far  back  as  1896  I  find  him 
saying,  "It  is  a  very  broken  down  person  who 
writes  to  you,"  and  on  another  occasion  he 
writes, 66 1  feel  as  if  I  had  a  personal  devil  after 
me  for  the  last  eighteen  months. "  For  years 
it  was  a  common  experience  with  him  to  do 
much  of  his  writing  in  bed.  In  fact,  a  certain 
physical  disability  dogged  his  footsteps  prac- 
tically all  his  life  long.  In  the  fall  of  1908, 
when  news  of  his  having  been  ill  got  into  print, 
he  sent  me  a  long  letter  for  publication  in  the 
Tribune ,  and  in  it  gave  this  account  of  the  bur- 
den against  which  he  had  had  to  contend :  — 

"As  I  am  led  into  talking  about  myself,  I 
wish  to  note  a  matter  which  is  interesting  to 
me,  and  which  is  also  interesting  in  a  general 


C  31  1 

manner,  and  this  is  that  I  have  been  off  and  on 
an  ill  man  since  the  years  1866  and  1867.  I 
was  paralyzed  by  what  later  was  supposed  to 
be  lead  poisoning,  which  affects  some  of  us 
painters  very  much,  and  which  can  be  con- 
tinued in  the  practice  of  the  art  of  what  is 
called  'stained  glass/  where  lead  is  much  used 
and  fills  the  air,  and  the  hands,  etc.,  of  the 
people  engaged.  Notwithstanding,  I  have 
done,  I  think,  as  much  as  any  artist  since  this 
illness.  Indeed,  to  point  a  moral,  I  think  that 
such  a  condition  is  an  enormous  incentive  for 
struggle.  The  lame  foot  of  the  late  Lord  Byron 
was  part  of  his  equipment  for  becoming  a  great 
English  poet.  The  same  for  many  of  the  paint- 
ers— take.  Mr.  Whistler,  for  instance,  and 
one  of  the  greatest,  Delacroix,  always  an  ill 
man,  from  a  similar  trouble  to  mine.  The  re- 
sult has  been  the  same  for  me  from  my  lame- 
ness, which  has  not  always  been  apparent,  but 
which  is  always  there,  and  which  city  life  and 
the  necessary  use  of  a  cab  ( at  which  my  friends 
laugh)  do  not  tend  to  diminish.  In  the  open 
air  of  far-away  countries  one  is  better  of  every- 
thing, and  I  have  walked  and  been  in  the 
saddle  for  days. 

"Some  thirty  odd  years  ago,  when  I  un- 


I  32  3 

dertook  the  beginning  of  decorative  work  in 
churches  by  painting  Trinity  Church,  my 
kindly  assistants  had  always  to  help  me  up 
the  30-foot  ladder  on  to  the  great  scaffold- 
ings. Not  to  mention  Saint-Gaudens,  who  is 
dead,  and  others,  Mr.  Maynard,  for  instance, 
will  remember  our  conditions.  This  did  not 
prevent  my  painting  on  the  wall,  slung  on  a 
narrow  board  sixty  feet  above  the  floor  of  the 
church,  with  one  arm  passed  around  a  rope 
and  holding  my  palette,  while  the  other  was 
passed  around  the  other  rope,  and  I  painted  on 
my  last  figure,  eighteen  feet  high,  which  had 
to  be  finished  the  next  morning  at  7  o'clock. 
I  painted  five  hours  that  night  in  that  way,  and 
painted  for  twenty-one  hours  out  of  the  twen- 
ty-four. For  a  sick  man,  you  can  see  that  the 
strain  was  well  met,  and  many  times  since  I 
have  had  to  go  through  this  physical  strain 
of  painting  a  big  picture  on  the  wall  from  the 
scaffoldings. " 

Nothing  could  shake  his  courageous  tenacity. 
Even  when  he  was  laid  on  his  back  he  would 
continue  to  labor.  With  neuritis  in  his  right 
hand,  so  that  "even  opening  a  newspaper  has 
been  hard,"  he  wrote  me  saying,  "and  yet  I 
have  done  things.  I  hope  the  bad  luck  has  not 


C  33  J 

been  reflected  in  the  work.,,  When  he  could 
not  work  in  bed  he  read  there.  "The  proof 
that  I  have  not  given  up  things,"  he  wrote  me, 
"is  that  I  am  trying  to  find  a  copy  of  Huys- 
mans'  'Trois  Primitifs.'  Everyone  knows  it. 
No  one  has  it.  I  have  scoured  town  as  far  as  I 
can.  ...  If  I  am  not  too  faint  I 'd  like  to  see 
you."  By  good  luck  I  had  the  book,  and,  faint 
as  he  was,  he  battened  on  it.  But  no  reading 
could  beguile  him  into  compromising  with 
bodily  weakness  and  staying  in  bed  an  instant 
longer  than  he  could  help.  Irresistibly  his 
work  would  get  him  on  his  feet,  and,  if  there 
is  something  painful,  there  is  also  something 
gallant  and  exhilarating,  about  the  way  in 
which  he  was  forever  pulling  himself  together, 
to  go  on  with  the  labors  which  made,  first  and 
last,  his  truest  happiness. 

Mingled  with  his  ruling  passion  there  was 
a  sense  of  duty.  Others  were  involved  in  his 
undertakings.  There  was  the  point  of  honor 
to  remember,  the  obligation  to  be  fulfilled. 
Thus  he  writes  me :  "  The  whirligig  of  time 
has  brought  its  annoyances.  Suddenly  I  am 
more  or  less  on  my  back.  ...  I  have  a  mul- 
titudinousness  of  ills  and  pains  that  must  be 
cared  for  seriously ;  because  besides  the  things 


L  34  n 

themselves  I  have  a  lot  of  work  to  carry  out, 
and  I  am  reminded  that  I  am  part  of  a  ma- 
chine like  any  other  cog."  At  another  time, 
complaining  of  "a  series  of  strange  failures 
of  health,"  he  nevertheless  goes  on  to  rejoice 
that  he  is  back  at  his  easel,  exclaiming,  "to- 
day I  am  very  proud,  because  I  have  been  able 
to  stand  up  and  paint.  It  seems  a  sort  of  dream 
when  I  look  back  upon  the  last  few  weeks ; 
the  painting  seems  to  be  the  unreal  thing." 
Telling  me  in  one  of  his  letters  how  much  he 
has  had  to  put  aside,  he  explains  that  "  this  is 
because  I  have  decided  to  go  on  with  my  work 
and  I  have  to  treat  myself  as  a  broken-down 
automobile  which  has  still  to  get  back  home. 
...  I  vary  intervals  of  work  by  giving  up 
everything  and  vice  versa."  But  sometimes 
nature  rebelled  and  he  had  to  ease  the  strain, 
whether  he  would  or  no.  Here  is  an  illustra- 
tion of  his  reluctance  to  slacken  work,  though 
he  knew  that  he  had  to  do  so  :  — 

ceI  am  writing  to  you  in  bed,  for  I  shall 
be  driven  when  I  get  up.  .  .  .  All  the  spare 
strength  and  all  the  time  of  to-day  will  be 
given  to  so  finishing  my  two  big  panels  that  I 
may  get  them  to  the  Century  Club  to-mor- 
row. .  .  .  Should  it  take  your  fancy,  come  in 


E  35  ] 

and  see  me  at  the  studio  before  that,  even 
though  I  am  at  work  to-day.  .  .  .  If  you  prefer 
seeing  my  two  big  traps,  etc.,  in  studio  light 
and  a  little  unfinished,  all  right.  This,  of 
course,  is  irregular  and  if  Miss  Barnes,  my 
watchdog,  were  here,  I  should  be  informed 
that  I  was  wasting  painting  time.  But  I  know 
that  I  can't  pull  at  it  all  day  —  I  am  not  strong 
enough.  .  .  .  *  There  you  are/ as  Harry  James 
has  it." 

The  admission  that  he  must  nurse  his  re- 
sources is  only  wrung  from  him  by  force  ma- 
jeure. His  ardor  for  work  was  so  intense  that 
he  rebelled  in  something  like  wrathful  bewil- 
derment when  pain  and  illness  gripped  him. 
"Why?"  he  asked  me  once,  with  sorrowful 
indignation,  "Why  am  I  ill  and  why  old?" 
No  other  mischance  of  fortune  could  seem  to 
him  half  so  cruel  or  so  unnecessary.  But,  after 
all,  it  did  not  conclusively  matter.  Down  to  the 
end  he  was  full  of  projects  and  splendid  reso- 
lutions, intent  upon  carrying  on  his  service  to 
beauty  the  moment  that  strength  returned.  He 
knew  that  with  energy  restored  the  mere  piling 
up  of  the  years  meant  nothing.  In  the  letter 
from  which  I  have  already  given  the  story  of 
his  early  and  ever-recurring  illness  he  goes  on 


C  36  3 

to  register  in  this  way  his  belief  in  the  pro- 
ductivity of  old  age :  — 

"  The  operations  of  art  are  largely  intel- 
lectual, and  can  be  met  by  a  life  devoted 
to  study  and  the  acquirement  of  the  proper 
knowledge.  We  have  had  and  have  still  a 
good  many  distinguished  artists  who  go  on 
with  their  work  late.  The  Frenchmen  of  the 
fifties  and  sixties  persisted  far  up  into  the  sev- 
enties and  eighties,  and  that  is  without  our 
daring  to  think  of  the  past  far  away,  when 
Michael  Angelo  andTitian  worked  up  to  a  very 
late  period  of  life.  Most  of  the  great  paintings 
of  Titian,  as  you  know,  such  as  the  marvellous 
<  Charles  V/  and  I  do  not  know  how  many 
hundreds  of  others,  were  painted  after  his  sev- 
enty-fifth year.  In  fact,  as  we  know,  he  passed 
away  at  ninety-nine,  owing  to  the  pestilence 
which  attacked  Venice.  As  an  artist  friend  of 
mine  used  to  say,  if  it  had  not  been  for  that 
he  might  still  be  painting.  I  cannot  hope  for 
such  a  lengthy  chance  of  doing  work  and  en- 
joying  that  wonderful  art  of  expressing  one's 
emotion,  but  I  think  that  I  may  still  go  on  for 
some  little  while." 

He  was  sustained  in  his  hard-fought  cam- 
paign by  his  sense  of  humor  and  his  unfail- 


t  37  ] 

ing  appreciation  of  the  little  things  of  life,  the 
pleasant  little  things.  As  in  the  experience 
of  that  acquaintance  of  Dr.  Johnson,  Oliver 
Edwards,  "Cheerfulness  was  always  break- 
ing in."  The  moment  that  suffering  began  to 
pass  away  he  was  ready  for  anything.  Writing 
to  me  at  such  a  point  of  improvement,  he  gayly 
says,  "  I  am  coming  to  that  stage  of  being  bet- 
ter at  which  my  Samoan  friends  like  a  little 
raw  fish.  You  know  they  have  a  special  word 
in  their  language  for  that  desire."  When  our 
smoking  bouts  had,  perforce,  been  interrupted, 
and  he  had  to  say  "I  am  still  off  my  smoke," 
he  would  talk  with  much  joking  about  the 
prospects  of  his  soon  getting  back  to  his  cigar. 
In  sickness,  too,  nothing  cheered  him  more 
than  a  word  of  goodwill  and  appreciation.  He 
liked  to  know  when  his  work  was  valued. 
Once  when  Miss  Barnes  had  gone  abroad 
upon  a  holiday  and  was  in  London,  Alma- 
Tadema  told  her  how  the  Kaiser  had  been  at 
his  house  a  day  or  two  before.  The  imperial 
visitor  had  admired  everything  he  saw  in  that 
famous  studio  and  dwelling,  but,  as  he  left,  he 
told  the  artist  that  the  one  thing  he  envied  him 
and  would  like  to  carry  away  was  the  window 
by  La  Farge  that  he  possessed.  La  Farge  was 


C  38  } 

greatly  tickled  over  this,  and  at  the  same  time 
he  wrote  to  me  with  glee  about  a  proposal 
then  afoot  —  Dr.  Bode  wanted  to  make  an 
exhibition  of  his  glass  at  the  Berlin  Museum. 
The  plan  ultimately  fell  through,  but  that  it 
was  thought  of  pleased  La  Farge.  A  creative 
artist  of  his  calibre  does  not  need  to  be  told 
when  he  has  done  well,  but  he  was  too  big 
a  man  to  assume  a  foolish  superiority  to  the 
generous  recognition  of  his  contemporaries. 
He  told  me  how  Rossetti,  seeing  something 
of  his  at  the  house  of  a  friend,  wrote  to  him 
over  here  a  handsome  message  of  encourage- 
ment. It  was  the  first  thing  of  the  sort  in  his 
life,  he  said,  and  it  was  really  helpful  to  him. 
A  passage  in  one  of  his  late  letters  shows  how 
this  feeling  of  thankfulness  for  friendly  stimu- 
lus lasted  with  him  through  life.  "  I  wish  to 
tell  you,"  he  wrote,  * c  that  I  have  a  great  com- 
plimentary message  from  Rodin  and  feel  much 
set  up." 

He  had  the  fundamental  modesty  of  the 
man  of  genius,  a  deep  consciousness  of  how 
far  short  of  his  aim  every  painter,  no  matter 
how  great,  has  always  fallen.  A  note  as  of 
noble  despair,  of  fine  humility  before  the  mag- 
nitude of  the  painter's  task,  creeps  into  one 


C  39  ] 

of  his  last  letters.  Writing  out  of  doors  he 
says :  — 

"  I  feel  in  every  part  of  each  second  that 
Nature  is  almost  too  beautiful — all  of  it, 
every  millionth  part  of  it,  light  and  color  and 
shapes.  .  .  .  Each  little  or  big  blade  of  grass 
in  front  of  me,  and  there  are  millions,  has  its 
shape  and  its  composition.  The  colors  are  ex- 
quisite. ...  As  I  lift  my  eyes  from  the  won- 
derful green  (never  painted  yet  by  man)  I 
see  a  pale  blue  sky  with  pale  cumulus  clouds, 
white,  with  violet  shadows,  and  on  the  other 
side  the  blue  is  deep,  and,  in  an  hour,  shall  be 
deeper  yet." 

Before  visions  like  that,  and  his  life  was 
full  of  them,  he  was  truly  humble,  reverent 
before  the  miracles  of  nature,  and  imbued, 
too,  with  a  sense  of  the  sacredness  of  his  call- 
ing. He  knew  what  desperate  difficulties  lie 
between  the  painter  and  the  adequate  expres- 
sion of  even  a  tithe  of  what  he  sees  in  the  end- 
less pageant  of  earth.  But  he  knew,  too,  what 
his  gifts  were,  the  singleness  of  his  purpose, 
and,  above  all,  the  rapture  of  achievement. 
These  and  other  emotions,  analysis  of  which 
belongs  more  properly  to  a  later  phase  of  my 
study,  confirmed  in  him  that  respect  for  him- 


I  40  3 

self  to  which  I  referred  at  the  outset.  If  a  tri- 
umph in  his  art  gave  him  joy  it  also  made  him 
proud. 

Every  reader  of  Landor's  life  will  remem- 
ber the  wretched  litigation  which  drove  him 
from  Bath  in  his  old  age  and  sent  him  back 
to  Florence,  where  the  English  minister,  Lord 
Normanby,  with  others,  took  note  of  the  scan- 
dal and  acted  accordingly.  To  the  leader  of 
his  enemies  the  fiery  poet  sent  a  memorable 
rebuke,  the  sting  of  which  resided  in  its  close : 
"  I  am  not  inobservant  of  distinctions.  You 
by  the  favour  of  a  Minister  are  Marquis  of 
Normanby.  I  by  the  grace  of  God  am  Walter 
Savage  Landor." 

La  Farge  was  like  that. 


II 


ANCESTRY  AND  EARLY 
LIFE 


WHEN  La  Farge  was  a  young  man, 
travelling  in  Europe,  he  met  at  Copen- 
hagen a  member  of  a  Danish  family  of  French 
origin,  M.  Jean  de  Joncquiere.  The  ancestors 
of  this  gentleman  had  left  France  in  the  time 
of  Henri  Quatre.  The  family  jealously  pre- 
served the  letters  written  by  that  monarch  to 
an  old  soldier  of  their  house,  who  had  fought 
under  him,  and  La  Farge's  friend,  though  he 
had  never  seen  the  land  of  his  forefathers,  pos- 
sessed its  language  and  cherished  its  memo- 
ries. Aware  of  the  visitor's  French  blood  he 
said  to  him,  "  Never  forget  your  descent.  It 
is  a  privilege  to  have  an  ideal  nationality." 
La  Farge  remembered.  He  had,  indeed,  a 
lively  sense  of  the  privilege  of  carrying  French 
blood  in  his  veins.  It  colored  his  whole  tem- 
perament and  undoubtedly  determined,  in  a 
measure,  the  movement  of  his  mind.  I  was 
with  him  once,  not  long  after  he  had  been  talk- 
ing with  a  kinswoman  of  his,  who  was  fond  of 


hunting  after  odd  things,  who  had  wondered 
why  the  name  of  Abraham  was  in  the  family, 
and  had  asked  him  if  it  suggested  any  Jewish 
ancestors.  La  Farge  was  not  sure  but  that  it 
did  and  he  mused  quizzically  on  the  subject; 
but  it  interested  him  only  as  something  very 
remote  and  vague.  That  he  came  of  a  line  of 
Frenchmen  was  all  he  really  knew  or  cared  to 
know. 

He  cared,  I  think,  not  only  in  obedience  to 
the  instinct  of  race  but  because  his  ancestral 
history  touched  his  imagination.  La  Farge 
lived  by  imagination  and  this  fact  is  my  gov- 
erning principle  in  traversing  his  life.  The 
place  of  his  birth,  the  houses  he  lived  in,  the 
sources  of  his  education,  the  journeys  he  made 
—  such  things  as  these  count  in  his  biography 
only  as  they  bear  upon  the  development  of 
his  character  and  the  fertilizing  of  his  brilliant 
intellect.  The  memories  that  he  rescued  from 
the  past  embraced,  of  course,  the  simple  every- 
day incidents  that  are  common  to  most  chil- 
dren and  young  men ;  but  as  he  looked  back 
at  his  boyhood  he  could  see  how  the  special  in- 
fluences at  work  therein  had  given  a  special 
turn  to  his  way  of  thinking  and  feeling.  Espe- 
cially he  recognized  the  formative  effect  at 


Sleeping  Woman 


//  is<//t<'  /'if  .  fain  .'ta.t*j€- 


I  43  ] 

that  time  of  associations  which,  if  then  but 
half  understood,  nevertheless  enlarged  his 
perspective  and  gave  him  an  obscure  con- 
sciousness of  contact  with  exceptional  condi- 
tions. Through  his  father  he  touched  hands 
with  participants  in  the  great  military  colli- 
sions and  political  upheavals  of  the  late  eight- 
eenth and  early  nineteenth  centuries.  There 
was  romance  in  the  possession  of  a  father 
who  had  felt  the  shock  of  the  French  Revo- 
lution and  had  been  in  peril  of  his  life  in 
scenes  of  tropical  adventure. 

It  was  in  1806  that  Jean-Frederic  de  la 
Farge  had  come  to  this  country,  a  lucky  refu- 
gee from  the  massacre  in  San  Domingo.  He 
had  come  to  the  island  as  an  Ensign  in  the 
naval  expedition  which  landed  General  Le- 
clerc  to  effect  the  seizure  and  transportation 
of  Toussaint.  Young  La  Farge  was  wounded 
in  the  action  through  which  his  ship  pierced 
the  British  blockade,  but  evidently  this  only 
heightened  his  spirits,  for  he  presently  ex- 
changed his  ensignship  for  a  lieutenancy  in 
the  army  and  was  thenceforth  in  the  thick  of 
the  turmoil.  He  was  captured  by  Guerrier  on 
one  of  his  expeditions,  falling  into  a  trap, 
"  very  much  as  it  might  be  in  the  Philippines 


[  44  ] 

to-day,"  and  did  not  regain  his  freedom  until, 
on  the  eve  of  the  massacre,  he  and  two  other 
whites  succeeded  in  evading  the  negroes,  and, 
starting  in  a  small  boat,  ultimately  boarded  a 
ship  bound  for  Philadelphia.  It  does  not  ap- 
pear that  he  had  any  thought  of  returning  to 
France  and  a  life  of  action.  Arrived  in  Amer- 
ica he  subsided  into  civil  life,  married,  and 
prospered.  His  wife  was  the  daughter  of  M. 
Binsse  de  Saint- Victor,  who  had  himself  at 
one  time  been  a  planter  in  San  Domingo,  a 
Frenchman  of  the  old  regime,  whose  family 
name  will  recur  more  than  once  in  this  narra- 
tive. The  elder  John  La  Farge,  as  I  gather  he 
called  himself  in  his  adopted  country,  had  laid 
down  his  arms  but  had  lost  nothing  of  his  en- 
ergy. While  the  dramatic  passages  in  his  ca- 
reer remained  but  a  memory,  flinging  their 
atmosphere  of  hazard  and  of  historic  events 
over  his  family  life,  he  gave  himself  up  to 
business  and  the  making  of  a  fortune.  He 
came  to  own  a  plantation  in  Louisiana  and 
extensive  properties  in  Jefferson  and  Lewis 
counties  in  New  York.  A  village  not  many 
miles  from  Watertown  still  bears  his  name, 
La  Fargeville.  In  the  city  of  New  York  he 
acquired  considerable  real  estate,  including  a 


C  45  ] 

hotel  and  a  theatre,  Tripler  Hall,  in  which 
his  son  was  later  to  witness  the  performances 
of  Rachel  and  to  make  sketches  of  the  great 
actress.  The  home  of  this  resourceful,  fortu- 
nate Frenchman,  closely  allied  with  the  lead- 
ers amongst  those  of  his  countrymen  whom 
political  catastrophe  had  cast  upon  our  shores 
and  soon  established  in  the  friendliest  relations 
with  the  quiet,  old-fashioned  society  of  New 
York,  was  naturally  in  the  lower  part  of  the 
town,  where  the  dwellers  in  sedate  houses 
preserving  an  aroma  of  colonial  days  regarded 
our  present  "up-town"  as  a  sort  of  undiscov- 
ered country.  It  was  in  one  of  these  houses, 
at  No.  40  Beach  Street,  that  John  La  Farge 
was  born  on  March  31,  1835. 

The  scene  of  his  birth  was  about  mid- way 
between  the  Battery  and  Washington  Square, 
within  easy  reach  of  both  places.  It  lay  under 
the  shadow  of  one  of  our  oldest  churches,  St. 
John's,  and  the  North  River  was  near  at  hand, 
the  shore  possessing,  of  course,  a  wholesome 
and  picturesque  character  long  since  obliter- 
ated. Looking  tenderly  back  at  his  earliest 
surroundings,  and  reconstructing  in  his  mind's 
eye  a  peaceful,  spacious  neighborhood,  La 
Farge  writes,  "  We  must  always  remember 


[  46  3 

that  this  is  Old  New  York.  The  charm  of  St. 
John's  park  extended  to  the  entire  length  of 
Beach  Street,  which  lined  it  on  the  south."  He 
goes  on  to  describe  his  first  conscious  vision 
of  it:  — 

"  I  had  just  come  from  Jefferson  or  Lewis 
or  any  of  those  counties,  where  my  father  had 
country  places,  and  was  selling  his  lands  and 
fighting  the  terrible  Joseph  Bonaparte  for 
damages  owing  to  neglect  and  waste  of  tim- 
ber. I  had  been  taken  as  a  treat  to  Water- 
town.  I  had  seen  wooden  houses.  I  came  by 
night  rides.  I  arrived  in  New  York  and  came 
into  this  street  of  brick  houses,  smothered  in 
the  evening  light,  a  scene  of  beauty  which  I 
still  have  in  my  mind,  and  I  sat  on  the  steps 
and  entered  into  conversation  with  a  little 
negro  boy,  David,  who  was  playing  the  jew's- 
harp,  which  also  was  an  absolute  novelty  to 
me.  I  cannot  to  this  day  separate  the  houses 
and  the  jew's-harp  and  my  first  sight  of  the 
negro  boy. 

"  He  belonged  to  my  uncle  by  marriage, 
the  Vicomte  de  la  Barre  de  Nantueil,  who 
had  just  returned  from  selling  his  plantations. 
Part  of  these,  if  I  remember,  he  had  from  my 
father,  who  rather  hoped  he  would  establish 


C  47  3 

himself  in  a  country  which  was  sure  to  bring 
fortune,  instead  of  returning  to  the  narrow 
life  of  the  Norman  or  Breton  gentleman  (for 
he  was  both)  and  to  a  struggle  for  a  political 
end  which,  of  course,  was  not  successful.  My 
uncle  was  a  beautiful  type  of  a  certain  moment 
in  France  which  cannot  exist  again.  ...  He 
was  not  a  handsome  man  but  evidently  mili- 
tary. .  .  .  He  had  served  in  Spain  on  the  pro- 
per side  and  had  with  other  gentlemen  the 
proper  grades  of  service  and  had  put  down 
the  liberal  reaction.  He  had  tried  the  holding 
of  slaves  and  he  hated  it.  Besides  (though  he 
cared  little  for  that,  on  account  of  his  political 
views)  holding  slaves  withdrew  the  right  of 
citizenship  from  a  Frenchman,  according  to 
French  law.  Now  he  was  also  a  very  strict 
Catholic  and  really  a  very  religious  man  in  a 
simple,  straightforward  way.  He  had  stood 
godfather  to  the  child  of  one  of  his  slaves.  Ac- 
cording to  church  ideas  he  was  responsible  for 
that  child,  so  he  brought  David  along  with 
him,  with  the  intention  of  taking  him  to  Eu- 
rope and  looking  after  him  there,  where  he 
would  be  free.  Our  law,  of  course,  did  not 
recognize  these  points ;  in  New  York  Davie 
was  a  slave  —  and  now  comes  in  a  touch  of 


C  48  ^ 

serious  comedy.  The  Abolitionists  were  after 
him,  so  that  he  had  to  be  watched  day  and 
night,  and  this  little  nig  wanted  all  the  time  to 
get  out,  as  it  was  also  his  first  town.  They 
got  him  off,  and  then  different  tribulations  fell 
upon  my  uncle.  He  had  to  put  that  boy  into 
school,  he  even  thought  of  college,  but  Da- 
vie was  sure  to  fall  in  love  and  follow  the 
travelling  circuses  and  had  to  be  brought 
back  again.  Then  a  trade  was  forced  upon 
him  and  a  little  establishment  in  Paris  (for  my 
uncle  thought  it  his  duty)  where  he  married, 
prettily,  a  young  negro  with  the  prestige  of 
singularity  and  capital  being  a  trouvaille  in 
that  sort  of  circle  in  Paris.  And  there,  in  1856, 
I  had  the  pleasure  of  calling  upon  him  at  his 
picture  framer's  shop,  which  was  my  small 
duty." 

I  must  mention  here  the  interesting  fact  of 
La  Farge's  clinging  all  his  life  to  the  region  in 
which  he  first  saw  the  light.  In  his  youth  the 
household  shifted  several  times  but  never  out- 
side the  boundaries  of  that  "Old  New  York" 
he  loved;  and  though  there  was  a  summer 
home  at  Glen  Cove,  Long  Island,  where  the 
elder  LaFarge  died,  in  1858,  the  family  life 
centred  around  the  neighborhood  of  Wash- 


C  49  U 

ington  Square.  He  would  never  desert  it.  He 
took  a  room  in  the  Tenth  Street  studio  build- 
ing on  his  return  from  his  first  European  trav- 
els, and  down  to  the  day  of  his  death  his  vari- 
ous studios  were  there,  with  his  stained  glass 
workshops  only  a  few  blocks  away,  on  the 
south  side  of  Washington  Square.  He  lived, 
too,  with  only  very  rare  and  brief  departures 
to  dwellings  further  north,  within  the  same 
narrow  radius.  Clinton  Place,  Washington 
Place,  Ninth  Street,  Tenth  Street,  lower  Fifth 
Avenue,  these  were  his  landmarks  for  more 
than  half  a  century.  In  fact,  it  was  impossible 
to  think  of  him  as  permanently  established  far 
from  the  spot  where  he  had  begun  life  as  a 
thinking  youth.  The  most  distinguished  of  our 
old  streets  and  our  old  houses  made  his  natural 
background.  Their  atmosphere  of  dignified 
retirement  from  the  sordid  rush  and  pressure 
of  a  commercial  city  was  his  own  atmosphere. 
It  was,  I  think,  one  of  the  felicitous,  most  ap- 
propriate chances  of  his  career  that  enabled 
him  to  place  in  the  Church  of  the  Ascension,  at 
the  corner  of  Fifth  Avenue  and  Tenth  Street, 
his  finest  mural  decoration  and  some  of  the 
best  of  his  windows.  Fate  was  kind  thus  to  per- 
mit him  to  enshrine  his  memory  at  the  one 


c  50  3 

point  in  his  native  city  with  which  his  daily  ac- 
tivities were  so  closely  associated. 

But  we  must  rejoin  him  on  the  threshold. 
He  was  born,  as  I  have  shown,  into  a  family  of 
historic  and  romantic  memories ;  but  we  take 
leave  for  a  moment  of  "battles  long  ago  "  and 
their  sinister  rumble,  and  turn,  rather,  to  some 
domestic  pictures  of  a  reposeful  simplicity.  He 
could  clearly  recollect  his  grandfather,  Binsse 
de  Saint- Victor. 

"He  happened  to  have  somewhat  of  an 
artistic  temperament/ '  wrote  La  Farge;  "it 
was  in  the  family;  and  he  was  as  gentle  and 
amiable  as  his  more  celebrated  brother,  the 
father  of  Paul  de  Saint- Victor,  was  not.  My 
grandfather  took  to  painting  miniatures  and 
giving  drawing  lessons  and  learned  his  art  as 
he  went  along.  I  dare  say  some  of  his  minia- 
tures may  still  exist.  On  a  small  scale  he  was 
an  exquisite  painter.  He  was  also  a  good 
teacher  and  started  me  at  six  years  old  in 
the  traditions  of  the  eighteenth  century.  My 
grandmother,  having  married  him,  began  a 
school  for  young  ladies." 

Old  Madame  Binsse  de  Saint- Victor  was, 
one  infers,  a  somewhat  formidable  but  very 
winning  woman,  whom  La  Farge  recalled  with 


C  51  3 

warm  affection.  Of  her  he  draws  this  vivid 
sketch :  — 

"My  grandmother's  school  became  ex- 
tremely successful,  her  pupils  being  chosen 
from  among  the  aristocracy  of  New  York,  and 
there  I  had  the  pleasure  of  falling  in  love  for 
the  first  time  with  Miss  J.,  who  at  the  age  of 
eighty  sent  me  a  few  years  ago  her  remem- 
brances of  that  time.  Besides  the  emotions  of 
love  I  had  the  advantage  of  knowing  the  emo- 
tions of  jealousy,  which  are  also  an  education. 
When  she  was  taken  away  and  I  felt  that  I 
could  no  more  see  her  put  up  her  back  hair,  I 
thought  life  had  ended  for  me.  I  used  occa- 
sionally to  go  to  my  grandmother's  and  fol- 
low some  of  the  lessons.  I  was  always  severely 
held  up  on  French  and  I  still  have  good  eigh- 
teenth-century French  as  one  of  my  posses- 
sions. 

"My  grandmother  was  very  handsome, 
with  momentarily  a  somewhat  severe  expres- 
sion, before  which,  I  am  sure,  everybody  bent. 
Her  ideas  were  of  the  eighteenth  century  and 
somewhat  opposed  to  the  habits  of  the  country. 
Her  occasional  severity  did  not  prevent  my 
grandmother  from  being  both  witty  and  liber- 
ally forgiving  in  the  way  of  literature.  I  re- 


C  52  ] 

member,  for  instance,  that  she  would  discuss 
La  Fontaine  and  Boccaccio  with  my  father 
with  full  comprehension  and  great  breadth  of 
view.  She  was  not  exactly  pious  but  very  re- 
ligious, despising  all  meannesses  and  details  of 
worship  but  holding  fast  to  the  essentials  of 
belief." 

All  of  La  Farge's  home  influences  bore  in 
one  way  or  another  upon  the  fostering  of 
moral  principle  but  it  amused  him  to  recall  the 
very  different  lines  along  which  these  influ- 
ences were  exerted.  The  central  government, 
so  to  say,  was  strict,  but  it  was  in  no  wise  rigid 
in  any  bigoted  sense.  Side  by  side  with  the 
ever-present  law  of  the  Roman  Church  there 
were  other  kinds  of  admonition,  though  all 
tended  in  the  one  salutary  direction.  Here  are 
some  further  glimpses  of  the  spiritual  elements 
in  his  father's  house:  — 

"At  home  I  was  not  severely  but  strictly 
trained  in  good  English  and  fairly  good  be- 
havior by  an  English  governess  who  was 
<  High-Church,'  the  very  highest  of  that  early 
date,  who  made  me  understand  some  details 
of  Anglican  tradition.  That  was  all  very  beau- 
tiful. Also,  I  had  a  little  German  influence.  In 
fact,  my  first  prayer  was  <  Vater  unser,'  taught 


C  53  ] 

me  by  my  Alsatian  nurse,  who  was  brought 
from  the  many  Alsatians  in  my  father's  colony 
in  northern  New  York,  for  always,  to  his  dy- 
ing day,  he  had  some  form  of  Alsatian  inherit- 
ance. I  feel  the  advantage  to  this  day  of  these 
widely  differing  influences.  My  nurse's  views 
of  religion  and  history  were  quite  barbarous, 
even  to  my  childish  knowledge,  and  I  enjoyed 
with  a  satirical  pleasure  her  statements  as  to 
the  ignoble  way  in  which  Martin  Luther  and 
his  wife  had  been  treated  by  the  Pope  at  some 
festival  of  food  in  common.  Then  she  melted 
out  of  my  life." 

Meanwhile,  the  retired  soldier,  who  had 
brought  from  his  native  Charente  a  certain 
keen  and  rationalizing  temperament,  and  had 
learned  in  his  European  battles  under  Napo- 
leon, as  well  as  in  his  bitter  experience  at  San 
Domingo,  to  deal  with  life  with  a  kind  of  imagi- 
native practicality,  played  a  notably  steady- 
ing part  in  the  training  of  his  sensitive  son.  I 
gather  that  La  Farge's  mystic  vein,  which  he 
never  lost,  was  overlaid  with  sterner  stuff 
through  his  father's  teaching,  that  the  latter 
drove  at  conduct,  inculcating  just  the  tangible 
convictions  needed  to  enrich  and  organize  an 
essentially  religious  nature.  The  tonic  influ- 


[  54  3 

ence  of  the  elder  La  Farge's  way  of  dealing 
with  the  lad  is  charmingly  illustrated  in  this 
recollection :  — 

<<  My  father  explained  to  me  what  right  and 
wrong  was,  according  to  his  moral  views, 
which  were  extremely  simple  but  very  severe. 
Nothing  was  more  awful  to  him  than  lying  or 
equivocation.  Several  times  I  fell  into  the  trap 
of  doing  wrong,  and  one  occasion,  small  as  it 
is,  I  think  I  shall  register.  We  used  to  go  to- 
gether to  see  various  French  people  down 
town,  and  among  others  was  a  gentleman  who 
imported  things  from  China.  I  knew  that  they 
were  not  like  our  own  Sevres,  and  one  day  I 
saw  some  little  image  and  put  it  in  my  pocket 
and  by  the  time  I  got  home  I  was  in  despair. 
I  had  done  a  thing  which  was  very  bad,  out 
of  mere  want  of  thought.  As  soon  as  we  got 
home  I  told  my  father,  thinking  the  world 
would  end  then  and  there,  but  it  did  not." 

He  recalled  other  childish  peccadilloes,  as, 
for  example,  writing  an  ambiguous  letter  ex- 
cusing another  boy  for  lateness  at  school,  but 
in  his  father's  opinion  he  had  not  been  so  much 
wrong  as  weak  in  the  commission  of  this  crime. 
« I  think  I  was  a  good  boy,"  he  says,  and  again 
he  describes  himself  as  "very  innocent."  He 


c  55 : 

and  his  little  comrades  frolicked  in  the  streets, 
peppering  with  pea-shooters  the  pigs  wander- 
ing there,  "and  we  said  awful  words  which 
we  thought  was  swearing,  the  wickedness  of 
which  we  none  of  us  very  well  understood." 
I  connect  with  these  remote  reminiscences  a 
conversation  we  had  in  the  last  year  of  his  life 
on  questions  of  good  and  evil.  There  was  a 
wonderful  gentleness  in  La  Farge  and  though 
he  had  gone  through  many  a  sharp  passage 
with  contemporaries  of  his,  and,  like  every  man 
of  force  and  character,  had  had  his  enemies,  he 
could  not  feel  in  retrospect  that  he  had  ever 
cherished  injurious  motives,  that  he  had  ever 
had  any  predisposition  toward  wrong-doing. 
It  never  occurred  to  him  to  see  himself  in  the 
role  of  "a  plaster  saint"  but  he  knew  that,  on 
the  whole,  he  had  been  true  to  the  spirit  of 
that  far-away  time  in  which  the  staunch  French 
moralists  who  brought  him  up  had  fixed  him 
in  their  faith. 

"I  suppose  I  went  to  school," he  says  in 
his  early  recollections,  but  then  he  goes  on 
to  speak  of  his  reading  as  enjoyed  under  his 
father's  direction.  His  mentor  "in  a  gentle 
way,  was  firm  and  resolute,"  and  he  was  glad, 
besides,  "to  learn  something  of  the  innumer- 


C  56  ] 

able  pretty  facts  which  mitigate  the  dryness 
of  geography  and  arithmetic,  which  I  hated, 
and  which  my  grandfather  insisted  upon."  It 
was  a  household  of  exact  thinking  and  strong 
literary  interests  and  evidently  the  boy  had  no 
sooner  learned  his  letters  than  he  was  encour- 
aged to  give  himself  to  books.  He  speaks  of 
no  nursery  favorites.  If  he  had  them  they  were 
abandoned  at  a  precocious  date.  When  he  be- 
gan to  browse  on  veritable  books  he  was  given 
sufficiently  substantial  fare,  as  witness  this  ac- 
count :  — 

"On  my  sixth  birthday  I  was  presented 
with  a  bookcase  and  a  library  and  I  sat  down 
to  read  '  Robinson  Crusoe,'  in  a  big  illustrated 
Harper  edition  with  drawings  by  Grandville. 
I  never  reread  it  until  five  years  ago,  at  New- 
port, and  the  marvellous  truthfulness  of  this 
made-up  narrative  was  forced  upon  me  by  my 
own  long  life.  In  my  library  I  had  Voltaire's 
'Life  of  Charles  the  Twelfth,'  the  'Lettres  a 
Emilie/  'Paul  et  Virginie,'  'Telemaque,'  the 
'Discours  sur  l'Histoire  Universelle'  of  Bos- 
suet,  and  Homer  in  a  French  translation,  I 
forget  whose,  but  it  was  more  enchanting  than 
'Robinson  Crusoe.'  Also  the  'Swiss  Family 
Robinson '  gave  me  notions  of  geography  and 


Wild  Roses  and  Water  Lily 


C  57  3 

natural  history  which  I  felt  to  be  quite  inade- 
quate but  very  charming. 

"On  the  other  side  the  family  bookcases 
were  filled  with  the  complete  works  of  Vol- 
taire and  other  long  rows  of  eighteenth-cen- 
tury writers ;  there  were  the  proper  books  of 
a  French  library,  such  as  Moliere,  Corneille, 
and  Racine,  and  then  came  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury men,  Paul  Louis  Courier,  political  and 
literary  writers  previous  to  1830,  and  also 
all  the  military  literature  of  that  period.  There 
were  the  proper  English  books  of  all  the  good 
men,  and  one  beautiful  copy  of  Byron,  with 
the  wonderful  copperplates  by  Turner.  On 
my  father's  table  lay  the  New  Testament 
in  French,  handsomely  bound,  with  some  pic- 
tures, into  which  he  dipped  from  time  to  time. 
...  Of  course  in  my  father's  library  there  was 
a  beautiful  set  of  Balzac,  with  the  famous  illus- 
trations of  Tony  Johannot,  eDon  Quixote/ and 
ever  so  many  contemporary  engravings  of 
the  Napoleonic  period;  Napoleon  with  the 
King  of  Rome  on  his  knee,  the  Empress  Jo- 
sephine, etc.  Where,  oh  where,  has  gone  the 
big  lithographic  portrait,  nicely  framed,  of 
Henry  the  Fifth  of  France,  which  hung  over 
my  little  bed,  and  for  whom  I  had  to  say  a 


C  58  ] 

prayer  every  night  and  morning  to  please  my 
grandmother,  who  hoped  I  should  one  day  help 
the  cause !  My  father,  who  held  exactly  oppo- 
site opinions,  would  smile  amiably,  and  some- 
times said  things  which  I  did  not  understand. 
Our  whole  family  arrangements,  intellectu- 
ally, met  every  turn  of  politics,  and  my  father 
had  seen  so  much  and  knew  the  reverse  of  so 
many  pages  that  it  was  easy  for  him  to  under- 
stand human  variability/' 

La  Farge  himself,  as  I  have  previously  in- 
dicated, was  to  share  this  comprehensive  and 
sympathetic  outlook  of  his  father's.  In  talk 
about  the  history  of  his  time  little  intimate 
touches  were  constantly  cropping  out.  Events 
had  faintly  brushed  him  as  they  passed  and 
with  others,  dating  from  before  his  birth,  he 
had  been  made  familiar  not  through  books 
alone.  So  clairvoyant  a  creature  was  certain  to 
receive  clear  and  lasting  impressions  amongst 
the  actors  in  old  dramas,  rehearsing  their  ex- 
ploits, even  though,  as  he  remarks  in  the  fore- 
going passage,  they  said  things  which  he  did 
not  understand.  His  imagination  would  re- 
spond, though  he  had  not  yet  obtained  the 
knowledge  necessary  to  the  coordination  of  all 
that  he  heard.  From  my  earliest  acquaintance 


C  59  J 

with  his  memories  of  life  under  his  father's 
roof  and  the  talk  to  which  he  then  listened  I 
had  always  felt  in  him  a  curious  magnetism, 
the  curious  power  to  enthrall,  which  belongs 
to  the  man  who  is  in  his  proper  person  a  link 
with  the  historic  past.  Long  after  he  had  given 
me,  in  a  general  way,  this  conviction  of  his 
closeness  to  a  vanished  epoch  and  its  heroes, 
he  sent  me  a  letter  containing  a  story  which  he 
wished  to  have  put  in  his  biography.  It  illus- 
trates in  a  very  concrete  form  the  stimulus  he 
drew  from  contact  with  his  father's  old  friends. 
Describing  it  as  an  incident  in  his  early  life, 
"before  I  was  twenty,  or  rather  lasting  up  to 
that  through  boyhood/ '  he  thus  recites  the 
anecdote :  — 

"Our  home  had  certain  visitors  who  were 
more  distinctly  private  friends.  One  of  them  is 
famous.  Of  course  you  have  read  Silvio  Pel- 
lico,  at  least  the  <Mie  Prigioni.'  Well,  do  you 
remember  his  companion,  Maroncelli,  in  that 
awful  dungeon  of  Spielburg,  where  they  were 
ten  years,  1822  to  1832,  underground,  in  a 
small  stone  cell?  Then  the  one-hundred-pound 
chain  began  to  mortify  this  good  poet's  leg  and 
they  had  to  cut  it  off,  and  the  indignant  cry  of 
Europe  got  even  as  far  as  the  German  mind 


[  6o  2 

and  they  were  let  out.  Well,  this  one-legged 
man  was  a  frequenter  of  our  house,  for  my 
father,  who  was  and  had  been  more  or  less  of 
a  Carbonaro,  liked  him  and  they  talked  the 
politics  more  or  less  of  the  day,  as  far  as  Italy 
and  its  connections  at  least.  And  these  were 
great,  of  course;  Bonaparte  and  England,  and 
Austria  and  Mazzini,  and  doubts  about  the 
justification  of  assassination,  and  the  romance 
of  Free  Italy.  But  that  also,  as  I  remember, 
was  wisely  kept  within  some  practical  result. 
Every  day  the  pressure  on  Europe  was  in- 
creasing; Napoleon  III.  was  coming  in  and  the 
boy,  me,  learned  quite  as  much  as  the  books 
and  memoirs  give  to-day  ( from  certain  angles, 
of  course).  We  did  not  know  of  Prussia,  of 
course,  yet.  Prussia  was  to  come  in  only  with 
1856-7— 8,  and  our  friends  did  not  know — nor 
did  Consul  C.  Lever,  as  you  will  remember, 
who  wished  to  help  Germany  and  Prussia  in 
the  interest  of  England ! ! !  Read  his  journal, 
etc.  I  mean  the  novelist.  To  return  to  the  good 
gray  Poet.  My  memory  of  him  tells  me  he 
was  kind  to  his  cruel  tormentors  and  half  mur- 
derers. He  understood  them;  he  understood 
the  natural  history  of  the  gaoler,  and  would 
relate  kindly  the  little  cruelties  inflicted  in  the 


[  61  H 

small  cell— underground  and  damp,  stone 
wall,  stone  bench,  nothing  else — but  even 
there  the  natural  malignity  of  man  found  some 
way  of  expression/' 

In  all  that  we  have  seen  thus  far  of  his  child- 
hood and  youth  we  can  trace  forces  working 
upon  his  moral  nature,  shaping  his  mind,  giv- 
ing an  impetus  to  his  curiosity  about  men  and 
things,  and  incessantly  feeding  his  imagina- 
tion. There  remains  the  appeal  to  his  aesthetic 
instinct,  the  germination  in  him  of  the  artist's 
passion.  But  it  is  important  to  note  that  there 
are  none  of  the  conventional  stories  to  tell 
about  a  vocation  proclaimed  in  infancy  and 
persisted  in  against  the  obtuseness  of  unsym- 
pathetic elders.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  and  as  we 
shall  see  in  detail  later,  it  was  to  take  LaFarge 
a  long  time  to  find  out  that  he  was  meant  to  be 
a  painter  and  cared  to  be  one.  Where  he  had 
extraordinary  good  fortune  was  in  breathing 
throughout  his  young  impressionable  years 
precisely  the  atmosphere  needed  to  lay  in  his 
character  a  ground-work  of  good  taste  and  to 
familiarize  him  with  art  without  professional- 
izing it  for  him.  He  was  in  a  position  to  take 
art  as  a  matter  of  course,  the  best  way  in  the 
world  in  which  an  artist  can  take  it  when  he  is 


C  62  3 

young.  The  very  envelope  of  his  daily  life  was 
calculated  to  have  some  disciplinary  and  fruit- 
ful effect  upon  his  ideas.  «  Our  house  was  really 
very  elegant/'  he  says,  "and  suited  my  father, 
who  had  seen  and  lived  in  the  proper  kind  of 
environment  in  Paris.  The  Napoleonic  splen- 
dor had  affected  him  without  his  knowing  it, 
and  mostof  our  furniture  was  Empire."  There 
was  his  grandfather  Binsse  de  Saint- Victor, 
"painting  miniatures  and  giving  drawing 
lessons."  The  invitation  of  these  conditions, 
coupled  with  the  talk  always  going  on  around 
him,  could  not  be  withstood  by  the  clever  boy, 
even  though  the  choice  of  the  artistic  career 
lay  still  very  far  in  the  distance  before  him. 
Everything  conspired  to  prepare  him  for  the 
path  he  was  ultimately  to  follow.  And  it  was 
characteristic  of  his  good  genius,  considering 
his  natural  bent  toward  a  wide,  historic  view 
of  art,  that  it  launched  him  under  old-world 
auspices,  so  to  say,  starting  him  with  sound 
anchors  of  judgment  to  windward. 

Several  years  ago,  in  the  summer  of  1906, 
I  had  been  asking  him  some  questions  about 
his  work,  and,  when  his  health  permitted,  he 
set  about  answering  them.  Late  that  Fall  he 
sent  me  from  Newport  a  rich  sheaf  of  mem- 


C  63  3 

ories,  saying,  "  To  note  my  beginnings  in  the 
art  of  painting  is  a  manner  of  writing  an  auto- 
biography; and  this  I  feel  inclined  to.  It  may 
also  serve  to  make  correct  the  development 
of  my  work,  which  is  interesting  to  myself,  at 
least,  and  of  course  connects  with  the  general 
story  of  painting  during  the  latter  half  of  the 
last  century.  It  has  been  my  fortune,  wrhether 
good  or  bad,  —  for  nobody  knows  what  the 
real  fortune  is  —  it  has  been  my  fortune  to 
understand  pretty  well  the  direction,  some  of 
the  methods,  the  prejudices,  the  dislikes,  the 
admirations,  of  the  schools  of  painting,  espe- 
cially of  the  French,  a  great  deal  over  a  cen- 
tury.' '  The  story  of  his  experience,  as  he  gave 
it  to  me,  goes  back  to  those  first  years  over 
which  we  have  already  glanced :  — 

"  The  influences  which  I  felt  as  a  little  boy 
were  those  of  the  paintings  and  works  of  art 
that  surrounded  me  at  home.  Some  reached 
further  back  than  the  early  Napoleonic  pe- 
riod, the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  century. 
There  were  on  the  walls  a  sea  piece  by  Ver- 
net;  some  imitation  historical  story,  that  of 
Daniel,  charming,  however,  in  color,  by  Le- 
moyne ;  two  great  battle  scenes,  now  ascribed 
to  Salvator ;  a  large  painting  of  Noah  and  his 


C  64  3 

sons,  ascribed  to  Sebastiano  del  Piombo ;  some, 
indeed  many,  Dutch  paintings  of  various  au- 
thors and  excellence,  among  them  a  beautiful 
Solomon  Ruysdael  which  I  yet  see  occasion- 
ally. All  this  and  the  very  furniture  and  hang- 
ings of  the  Empire  parlor  did  not  belong  to  the 
Victorian  epoch  in  which  I  was  growing  up. 

"It  so  happened  that  my  very  first  teach- 
ings were  those  of  the  eighteenth  century  and 
my  training  has  covered  almost  a  century  and 
a  half. 

"I  was  just  six  years  old  and  I  had  wished 
to  learn  to  draw  and  paint  for  whatever  was  to 
come  of  it,  a  mere  boy's  wish.  My  father  took 
me  to  my  grandfather,  the  father  of  my  mother, 
who  had  for  some  time  been  a  painter,  espe- 
cially of  miniatures,  and  not  a  bad  one.  I  never 
knew  exactly  how  he  came  by  his  training.  I 
was  too  young  to  talk  of  such  things ;  for  as 
long  as  we  are  young,  things  merely  happen ; 
they  don't  come  by  any  sequence.  My  grand- 
father had  been  obliged  to  do  something  for 
himself,  on  coming  to  the  United  States  with 
wife  and  children,  and  his  escape  from  San 
Domingo  and  the  ruin  of  his  plantation  and 
wealth,  for  his  plantation  was  one  of  the  larg- 
est in  the  islands  or  on  the  mainland.  He  had 


C  65  ] 

at  that  time,  the  end  of  our  Revolution,  re- 
ceived Admiral  Rochambeau  as  a  guest,  and 
my  uncle,  his  eldest  son,  was  named  after  the 
Admiral.  My  grandfather  had  fled,  like  many 
others,  and  was  a  ruined  man.  His  slaves,  of 
course,  were  free  and  his  plantation  destroyed 
and  his  mansion  and  all  about  it  turned  into  a 
wilderness.  His  fate  was  not  solitary  in  that 
moment  of  the  world.  .  .  .  This  has  nothing  to 
do  with  my  artistic  education.  I  remember  my 
grandfather  expressing  a  dislike  to  the  insti- 
tution of  slavery.  This  came  about  through 
something  he  said,  which  I  vaguely  remem- 
ber, of  his  having  gone  to  the  coast  of  Africa 
as  a  youngster,  to  get  slaves ;  where  he  saw, 
of  course,  some  of  the  horrors  of  what  was  to 
be  the  basis  of  his  fortune. 

"The  old  gentleman  had  fallen  back  on 
this  accomplishment  and  upon  his  general 
reading,  and  he  taught  and  painted  and  did 
what  was  the  evident  thing,  to  use  what  had 
been  ornament  for  a  basis  of  living.  I  ought  to 
add,  however,  that  his  studies  had  been  seri- 
ous enough  to  give  him  also  a  certain  know- 
ledge of  architecture,  so  that  he  made  de- 
signs for,  and  saw  to  the  carrying  out,  of  the 
old  French  church  in  Canal  street,  which 


C  66  ] 

was  really  a  building  of  a  good  deal  of  char- 
acter. 

"To  him,  therefore,  I  came  to  get  my  first 
lessons  of  art,  which  were  sadly  prosaic  and 
which  would  have  driven  me  away  if  it  had 
not  been  that  my  father  insisted  upon  my  car- 
rying out  anything  that  I  had  proposed  to  do. 
The  teaching  was  as  mechanical  as  it  could  be, 
and  was  rightly  based  upon  the  notion  that  a 
boy  ought  to  be  taught  so  as  to  know  his  trade. 
There  was  not  the  slightest  alleviation  and  no 
suggestion  of  this  being  <art/  After  having 
learned  thoroughly  how  to  sharpen  crayon, 
how  to  fasten  paper,  how  to  cover  large 
surfaces  with  parallel  lines  so  as  to  make  a 
tint,  I  was  gradually  allowed  to  begin  to  copy 
things  that  represented  something.  I  was 
given  engravings  to  copy,  which  engravings 
were  made  on  purpose  to  imitate  the  touch  of 
the  crayon.  These  were  of  older  make  than 
the  lithograph,  then  only  recently  invented. 

"Gradually  the  work  became  more  inter- 
esting, and  by  the  time  I  was  eight  years  old 
I  could  begin  to  do  something  that  had  a  cer- 
tain amount  of  careful  resemblance  to  an  ori- 
ginal. I  still  have  some  of  these  very  early 
pieces  of  work.  Then  came  more  liberty  and 


C  67  ] 

I  copied  right  and  left,  beginning  even  to  paint 
in  water  color  a  little  by  myself.  And  the 
boy's  little  studies  from  nature  have  some 
amount  of  something,  both  in  drawing  and 
color. 

< 6  Of  course,  by  the  time  that  I  was  eight  or 
ten  the  books  of  the  house  began  to  be  un- 
folded to  me,  and  the  more  modern  works  of 
that  day,  the  forties,  as  shown  in  books,  inter- 
ested me  very  much.  Already  I  was  begin- 
ning to  think  that  the  samplers  of  my  grand- 
father were  rather  stupid,  which  was  what 
they  were  meant  to  be.  Then  came  school, 
of  course,  and  no  more  natural  study  of  any- 
thing and  even  a  hatred  of  the  miserable 
teachings  of  the  drawing  master.  Drawings 
of  course  were  made  to  amuse  the  other  boys 
or  to  kill  time  in  the  dreary  hours  that  used  to 
be  the  fate  of  the  schoolboy  at  that  time. 

"Then,  for  a  little  while,  broke  a  slight 
opening  into  the  blue  by  my  finding  an  Eng- 
lish water  color  painter,  who  gave  me  thor- 
oughly English  lessons.  At  that  time  I  was  in 
the  Grammar  School  of  Columbia,  which  was 
very  near  to  my  teacher's  rooms,  so  that  I 
followed  easily  a  discipline  which  would  have 
been  irksome  with  less  chance  of  lounging. 


C  68  ] 

But  all  this  was  absolutely  inartistic  at  bottom, 
on  my  part,  and  nothing  but  the  fancy  of  a 
youngster  for  something  else  than  his  usual 
occupation.  Then  came  college,  a  still  greater 
extinguisher  of  art,  at  least  in  the  way  of  the 
use  of  the  eye  and  hand.1 

"Contrariwise,  my  professor  in  English 
took  me  suddenly  into  the  literary  and  histori- 
cal side  of  art.  He  was  an  Oxford  man,  had 
joined  in  the  Oxford  Movement,  had  become 
a  Catholic  with  Newman  and  the  others,  and 
then  a  Catholic  priest,  further  than  which  he 
could  not  go.  We  are  talking  of  a  date  a  few 
years  after  Newman's  decision.  Mr.  Ruskin 
was  beginning  about  this  moment,  1851,  per- 
haps, and  his  writings  were  a  source  of  pleas- 
ure and  instruction — I  mean  teaching — to  my 
friendly  professor.  I  was  made  or  allowed 
to  read  anything  which  would  bring  up  the 
beauty  of  the  mediaeval  ideal,  and  even  out- 
of-the-way  knowledge  was  shown  me,  so  that 
at  this  date  I  was  already  far  away  from  the 

1  La  Farge  obtained  his  scholastic  education  from  more 
than  one  source.  Columbia,  St.  John's  College  at  Fordham, 
and  Mt.  St.  Mary's  College  at  Emmitsburg,  Maryland,  all 
had  a  share  in  it.  It  was  from  Mt.  St.  Mary's  that  he  was 
graduated,  in  1853. 


Z  69  ] 

eighteenth  century  and  was  being  taught  how 
wrong  all  sorts  of  things  in  art  were  which  did 
not  agree  with  the  mediaeval.  But  all  this  was 
literature  and  history  and  archaeology  at  bot- 
tom, rather  than  the  study  of  art. 

"  Still,  under  such  influences  there  was 
probably  encouraged  some  more  studious  feel- 
ing. Perhaps  the  sight  of  some  engravings  of 
Albert  Durer  may  have  done  something.  But 
you  must  remember  that  at  this  time  the  pho- 
tograph was  onlyjust  beginning  to  be  invented 
and  really  accurate  copies  of  anything  not  in 
the  fashion  of  the  day  were  unknown.  We  do 
not  realize  sufficiently  the  enormous  change 
of  the  early  middle  of  this  century  in  giving  us, 
for  the  first  time,  a  sense  of  responsibility  in 
the  copying  of  works  of  art  of  the  past.  The 
lithographs  were  beginning  to  help  in  that  way 
and  in  a  few  years  the  photograph  was  to 
change  the  entire  question.  What  one  would 
have  given  at  that  time  for  a  photograph  from 
an  old  master  such  as  we  have  by  thousands 
every  day,  can  hardly  be  guessed  at.  I  re- 
member how  some  years  afterward  M.  Charles 
Blanc,  Director  of  Fine  Arts  for  France,  sent 
me  the  first  photograph  taken  from  a  fresco. 
Great  treat,  a  wonderful  success,  etc. 


C  70  3 

"  I  was  intending  to  state  that  to  my  great 
surprise  to-day,  the  few  serious  drawings  made 
by  me  at  that  date,  in  the  very  early  fifties, 
are  occasionally  sufficiently  good  to  look  more 
respectable  to  me  to-day  than  they  did  then, 
for  I  attach  no  importance  to  them  except  as 
study.  But  they  were  largely  based  on  line 
and  construction  which,  of  course,  gives  a  basis 
of  seriousness. 

"  After  college  there  was  again  a  moment 
of  a  little  interest  in  painting,  because  a  French 
artist  was  an  acquaintance  of  some  French 
friends  and  needed  lessons,  so  that  several  of 
us  took  some  and  I  got  into  this  distinct  rela- 
tion to  the  art  of  painting.  Then  came  the  ac- 
quaintance with  pictures  that  were  just  show- 
ing their  faces  in  this  country,  the  French 
school  of  1830.  I  remember  the  delight  of 
buying  a  Diaz  and  a  Troy  on  and  a  Barye  for  a 
few  dollars  that  I  had  intended  for  books  in- 
stead. The  lithographs  from  these  men  be- 
ginning to  be  famous  in  Europe  came  into  our 
market  and  affected  many  of  us.  Mr.  Wins- 
low  Homer,  whom  I  did  not  know  until  later, 
was  a  student  of  these  things  and  has,  like 
myself,  been  largely  made  by  them. 

"I  knew  few  or  no  American  painters, 


C  71  3 

though  I  was  brought  suddenly  into  the  ac- 
quaintance of  George  Inness,  who  was  begin- 
ning to  turn  from  the  American  method,  that 
I  scarcely  knew  about,  to  the  French.  This 
was  helped  by  my  teacher,  who  had  made 
his  acquaintance  and  who  was  anxious  to  in- 
fluence various  of  my  acquaintances  as  buyers 
for  the  artist  whose  change  of  method,  like 
the  change  of  method  of  Mr.  Homer  Martin 
later,  might  involve  him  in  that  depreciation 
which  artists  have  to  risk  in  such  cases.  There 
is  nothing  the  public  detests  more  than  a 
change  in  the  manner  of  doing  anything.  We 
associate  the  man  with  his  work  to  such  an  ex- 
tent as  to  forget  that,  like  everyone  else,  he 
may  follow  some  path  to  suit  himself. 

"This  acquaintance  had  very  little  influ- 
ence upon  me,  because  there  were  few  chances 
of  seeing  our  artist  in  his  studio  at  his  work, 
and  my  teacher,  notwithstanding  his  admira- 
tion, was  a  person  on  a  very  small  scale  of 
capacity;  the  usual  teacher  that  we  know.1 
But  the  names  he  used  became  more  and  more 
familiar,  especially  as  they  were  known  to  me 
through  the  literature  which  I  was  then  ab- 
sorbing. 

1  Note  of  1910:  "  This  is  unjust.  He  became  better." 


C  72  ] 

"  De  Musset,  Heine,  and  Balzac  I  had  read 
every  word  of,  as  well  as  the  greater  part  of 
the  current  writers  of  the  day  in  France,  and, 
of  course,  the  Ruskinian  explanation,  con- 
nected with  Turner,  was  a  large  factor  in  my 
training  and  my  amusement.  Acquaintances 
of  mine,  I  should  say  friends,  here  in  New 
York,  had  personally  known  these  famous 
French  writers.  A  few  years  later  I  was  to 
meet  some  of  the  men  of  whom  I  had  read  or 
whose  work  I  knew,  though  Balzac  was  to  die 
in  '51,  and  I  was  too  late,  in  '56,  on  coming  to 
Paris,  to  know  more  of  Heine  than  that  he  had 
just  died.  Some  of  my  new  acquaintances  and 
friends  could  tell  me  some  few  things  more 
concerning  the  mysterious  being  who  affected 
us  all  from  his  bed  of  pain  and  misery.  All 
this  literature  is  in  absolute  order  with  the  in- 
fluences of  painting,  for  in  France  and  in  Eng- 
land the  romantic  leaven  acted  both  in  litera- 
ture and  in  the  other  arts,  even  in  the  art  of 
music." 

The  natural  upshot  of  all  this  fermentation 
was  a  departure  for  Europe.  With  his  horizon 
rapidly  expanding  it  was  inevitable  that  La 
Farge's  gaze  should  turn  abroad.  He  had  the 
"  seeing  eye"  and  he  was  eager  for  new  sen- 


C  73  ] 

sations.  Again,  however,  we  must  remember 
that  he  still  had  no  intention  of  adopting 
art  as  his  profession.  The  spirit  in  which  he 
started  upon  his  travels  is  exactly  defined  in 
this  fragment:  "In  the  early  part  of  1856, 
April,  I  think,  or  March,  I  went  to  Europe, 
having  already  passed  some  little  while  in  a 
lawyer's  office  —  enough  to  make  me  doubt 
whether  my  calling  lay  in  that  direction,  but 
the  American  habit,  at  least  in  these  days, 
tended  to  place  any  doubtful  mind  into  some 
such  training  or  place  of  rest.  Europe  was  to 
be  a  manner  of  amusement,  and,  for  me,  of 
taking  up  also  some  family  connections. "  He 
embarked,  by  the  way,  in  a  famous  old  ship, 
"The  Fulton,"  the  then  new  side- wheeler 
about  which  everybody  was  talking.  His 
father  going  with  him  one  day,  to  look  it  over, 
told  him  that  he  had  sailed  the  Hudson  on 
the  second  trip  of  Fulton's  boat.  La  Farge's 
objective  point  was,  of  course,  Paris.  His 
kinsfolk  were  there,  the  Saint- Victors,  and, 
equally  of  course,  as  it  seems  to  me  when 
I  consider  on  what  a  favorable  stream  his 
destiny  was  borne,  they  were  the  very  friends 
to  initiate  him  into  his  Europe. 


Ill 


EUROPE 

IN  Nadar's  portrait-charge  of  Paul  de  Saint- 
Victor  the  celebrated  man  of  letters  car- 
ries himself  in  an  attitude  of  superb  aplomb, 
and  with  one  hand  nonchalantly  sets  off  in- 
numerable fireworks.  Where  are  those  fire- 
works now?  Perhaps  there  are  still  readers 
who  turn  in  leisurely  browsings  to  his 
"Hommes  et  Dieux"  or  his  "Femmes  de 
Goethe,' '  but  as  a  literary  personage  the  au- 
thor of  those  once  popular  books,  and  of  count- 
less fugitive  criticisms,  long  since  ceased  to 
rank  amongst  the  salient  figures  in  French 
prose.  At  the  time  of  La  Farge's  first  visit  to 
Paris,  to  realize  a  cousinship  which  had  always 
been  kept  alive  by  intimate  communications 
between  the  two  families,  Saint- Victor,  then 
in  his  thirties,  was  already  a  writer  of  some 
experience,  and,  in  fact,  was  rising  to  the 
crest  of  the  wave.  He  had  been  the  secretary 
of  Lamartine,  but  had  turned  journalist,  and 
La  Farge  found  him  contributing  articles  on 


The  Three  Kings 


C  75  3 

literature,  art,  and  the  theatre  to  half  a  dozen 
papers.  Some  years  afterwards,  to  be  exact, 
in  1870,  he  was  to  be  appointed  Inspector  of 
Fine  Arts  and  to  take  on  the  traits  of  maturity 
fitting  in  a  governmental  functionary,  but  in 
the  'fifties  he  was  still  young  and  exceedingly 
debonair,  the  true  type  of  the  boulevardier  and 
feuilletoniste. 

You  hear  a  good  deal  about  him  in  the 
"Journal"  of  the  Goncourts,  who  report  his 
vehement  conversation,  saturated  in  classical 
lore,  but,  for  that  matter,  in  the  literature  of 
all  ages,  and  vitalized  by  an  inexhaustible  en- 
thusiasm. They  describe  him  in  his  own  little 
salon,  surrounded  by  facsimiles  of  the  draw- 
ings of  Raphael  and  other  great  Italian  mas- 
ters, and  looking,  himself,  in  a  kind  of  radiant 
disorder,  as  handsome  as  an  Ephebus  of  the 
Renaissance.  They  draw  even  more  telling 
vignettes  of  their  friend  moving,  to  the  man- 
ner born,  through  the  glittering  panorama  of 
that  amazing  monde  of  Paris  in  which  the 
ordinary  aspects  of  a  man's  private  life  are 
pushed  aside  and  almost  obliterated  by  larger 
interests.  Even  the  personal  concerns  of  the 
successful  litterateur  of  that  day  were  part  of 
the  public  spectacle.  We  see  Saint- Victor  at 


I  76  3 

the  Porte-Saint-Martin,  looking  on  with  a  pro- 
prietary interest — and  to  the  huge  edification 
of  scores  of  those  who  were  in  the  secret — at 
the  performance  of  Lia  Felix,  Rachel's  sister, 
in  a  piece  by  Mocquard.  As  the  Goncourts 
say,  "  La  pi&ce  n'est  pas  sur  le  theatre,  elle 
est  dans  la  salle.  L'intrigue  et  le  drame,  c'est 
la  declaration  officielle  des  amours  de  Saint- 
Victor  et  de  Pactrice  en  sc&ne."  All  eyes  were 
directed  upon  the  marble  face  of  the  critic  — 
when  they  were  not  turned  toward  the  Ari- 
adne he  had  abandoned,  half  hidden  in  one  of 
the  balconies  behind  an  immense  black  fan. 
Talking  about  Rachel  one  night,  La  Farge 
showed  me  three  little  photographs  of  Lia, 
which  had  just  come  to  light  in  some  old  bu- 
reau, and  mused  on  the  scenes  they  revived. 
He  recalled  the  "family  row"  caused  in  Paris 
over  the  question  of  " recognizing' '  Lia's 
daughter  and  Paul's.  Some  of  the  kinsfolk  did 
not  like  it.  But  ultimately  Saint- Victor  left  his 
child  all  his  money,  a  fact  which  I  note  as  sig- 
nificant of  his  close  identification  with  the  ro- 
mantic world  in  which  he  lived. 

It  was  a  feverish  world,  packed  with  work 
of  an  exciting  sort,  the  work  of  the  brain, 
dedicated  wholly  to  ideals  of  art,  and  crowded 


C  77  3 

with  brilliant  personalities,  all  of  whom  were 
Saint- Victor's  comrades.  Gautier,  Gavarni, 
Mario  Uchard,  About,  Baudelaire,  Flaubert, 
Sainte-Beuve,  were  all  of  the  company,  for- 
ever doing  great  things  and  forever  talking 
about  them  at  dinners,  in  the  corridors  of  the- 
atres, and  at  their  favorite  cafes.  The  con- 
versation in  Saint- Victor's  circle  took  a  wide 
range.  It  soared  to  heights  and  not  seldom  it 
was  bowled  as  low  as  to  the  fiends.  But  what- 
ever the  issue  these  contestants  in  paradox 
had  gusto,  ardor,  a  generous  and  enkindling 
feeling  for  everything  that  led,  or  so  much  as 
promised  to  lead,  to  a  new  thought,  a  new 
emotion.  It  was  a  time  of  magnificent  affir- 
mations and  Saint- Victor,  letting  himself  go 
when  a  thing  excited  his  appreciation,  never 
erred  on  the  side  of  understatement.  Grant 
Duff,  in  his  diary,  speaks  of  going  with  Renan 
to  visit  Victor  Hugo.  "  I  found  the  old  gentle- 
man surrounded  by  his  court/ '  he  says,  and 
Saint- Victor  was  amongst  the  acolytes.  Loy- 
alty to  a  romantic  chief  was  characteristic  of 
him  and  a  passage  from  his  writings  on  Vic- 
tor Hugo  will  give  a  good  taste  of  his  critical 
quality.  In  his  essay  on  "La  Legende  des 
Si&cles  "  he  says :  — 


C  78  ] 

"In  order  to  revive  this  buried  world,  the 
poet  made  for  himself  a  new  style,  a  tongue 
with  a  hundred  chords,  —  Biblical,  and  Dan- 
tesque,  feudal  and  popular,  haughty  and  sin- 
cere, brilliant  in  tone,  loaded  with  reliefs, 
streaked  with  the  colors  of  life  and  the  shift- 
ing shadows  of  dreamland,  equally  fit  to  paint 
a  rose  in  bloom  between  the  fingers  of  a  child 
and  a  drunken  carouse  of  brutes  seated  on  a 
litter  of  corpses,  to  sing  the  De  Profundis  of  a 
sphinx  or  the  rollicking  ballad  of  a  band  of  sea 
adventurers.  Since  Dante  and  Shakespeare, no 
literature  has  produced  its  equal. 99 

His  friends  praised  his  style  and  he  is  re- 
membered for  that,  if  for  nothing  else.  To- 
day it  seems  perhaps  a  little  florid,  unduly 
charged  with  romantic  fervor.  And  even  in 
his  own  time  he  had  his  critics.  Edouard  Gre- 
nier  records  a  suggestive  saying  of  Lamartine. 
"As  for  Saint- Victor,  he  declared  that  you 
could  not  read  his  works  without  blue  spec- 
tacles." 

I  do  not  believe  that  La  Farge  put  them  on. 
He  was  twenty-one  and  keen  upon  the  fray. 
If  anything  had  been  needed  to  make  it  rose- 
colored  for  him  it  was  just  his  reception  into 
a  group  of  people  whose  way  of  life,  at  some 


C  79  1 

points  at  least,  coincided  with  that  which  he 
had  left  behind  him.  The  strangeness  of  Eu- 
rope was  instantly  modified,  if  not  completely 
dissipated,  by  a  consciousness  of  his  being 
merely  in  another  home.  He  told  me  that  he 
had  often  regretted  not  asking  more  questions 
in  those  days,  though  asking  questions  was 
one  of  his  foibles.  "  I  was  too  young,"  he 
said, "  too  young  and  light-headed  and  happy." 
Once  more  I  must  recur  to  his  imagination, 
wax  to  receive  and  marble  to  retain  impres- 
sions little  by  little  deepening  that  insight  of 
his  into  human  problems  which  was  one  of 
the  great  resources  of  his  life.  His  father  had 
accustomed  him  to  an  atmosphere  full  of  the 
meaning  of  history  and  in  Paris  he  drew 
nearer  to  the  Napoleonic  drama.  This  and  his 
quick  apprehension  of  character  made  him  a 
delighted  frequenter  not  only  of  the  Bohemia 
in  which  his  cousin  moved  but  of  his  grand- 
uncle's  salon,  where  memories  of  an  heroic 
past  were  still  fresh  and  bleeding. 

Paul  de  Saint- Victor,  like  his  American 
relative,  had  a  notable  parent,  an  old  lion  of  a 
man  who  "had  lived  a  violent  life  in  the  time 
of  the  Revolution."  He  had  translated  Ana- 
creon  and  had  artistic  predilections,  but  these 


C  80  3 

elements  of  a  delicate  charm  were  subordi- 
nate to  the  sterner  appeal  that  he  made.  "He 
had  seen  every  execution  except  that  of  the 
Queen,  and  he  crossed  Charlotte  Corday  as 
she  came  down  the  steps  of  Marat's  house, 
into  which  he  was  going  to  see  his  publisher, 
who  lived  in  the  same  building.  It  may  be 
that  my  granduncle,  who  at  that  time  was  po- 
litically a  very  religious  agent  for  the  throne 
and  the  crown,  only  later  to  fall  under  de 
Maistre's  guidance,  was  going  upstairs  to  see 
about  some  of  his  lighter  works,  which,  I  do 
not  know.  A  certain  fondness  for  the  stage 
and  its  ladies  brought  him  later,  in  1805, 
against  Stendhal  in  the  person  of  a  Mile. 

 ,  who  preferred  Saint- Victor."  The  lady 

was  Melanie  Guilbert,  an  actress  who  figures 
at  length  both  in  the  "  Journal' '  of  Stendhal 
and  in  his  "  Correspondance."  In  the  former 
the  jealous  lover  scornfully  dubs  his  rival  a 
poetaster  but  it  is  plain  that  Saint- Victor 
caused  him  endless  worry.  One  can  imagine 
with  what  breathless  attention  La  Farge  drank 
in  the  reminiscences  of  this  veteran,  in  the  in- 
tervals of  exploring  Parisian  society  with  the 
young  leaders  in  art  and  letters. 

As  he  looked  back  in  after  days  upon  the 


"  Noli  Me  Tangere" 


C  81  1 

European  opportunities  of  his  youth  he  was 
wont  to  regret,  as  I  have  just  indicated,  that 
he  had  not  taken  better  advantage  of  them. 
But  he  knew  that  those  old  encounters  had 
not  been  wasted  upon  him  and  he  gives  them 
their  full  value  in  the  narrative  of  his  artistic 
education,  which  we  here  resume : 

"My  granduncle,  whose  house  I  used  to 
frequent  in  Paris,  had  been  a  writer  upon  art, 
a  collector  of  fine  paintings,  and  acquainted 
with  many  famous  artists  of  his  prime.  He 
had  also  known  most  of  the  literary  men  who 
could  have  come  within  his  chances.  .  .  .  My 
granduncle  had  also  a  further  spread  to  his  in- 
terests and  consequent  connections ;  he  had 
been  a  fervent  Royalist,  engaged  in  all  sorts 
of  difficulties  during  the  Revolutionary  and 
Napoleonic  periods.  Like  many  others  he  had 
become  a  strong  churchman  and  in  his  forced 
exile  in  Russia  had  known  the  great  type  of 
his  efforts  in  that  way,  the  famous  de  Maistre. 
So  art  and  literature  were  there  at  my  hand, 
in  rather  an  ancient  form,  but  with  the  charm 
of  the  past,  the  eighteenth  century  and  the 
wonderful  beginning  of  the  nineteenth. 

"Occasionally  men  like  my  granduncle 
were  troubled  because  their  friends  of  reli- 


gious  literary  views,  even  Royalists  besides, 
were  beginning  to  uncover  more  and  more 
the  merits  of  the  mediaeval  painters  and  the 
glories  of  mediaeval  art.  For  the  younger 
men  as  typified  in  England  by  Mr.  Ruskin 
and  some  earlier  ones  all  this  was  natural 
enough,  but  in  France  the  conservative  feel- 
ing was  shocked  by  the  new  admirations 
which  had  not  belonged  to  their  early  days 
and  which  often  gathered  strength  from  their 
own  principles  of  philosophy  and  religion. 
We  do  not  realize  to-day  the  contradictory 
currents  which  must  have  tortured  the  high 
thinking  people  of  the  end  of  the  middle  of 
the  last  century. 

"To  me,  of  course,  this  was  a  delightful 
source  of  pleasure.  To  have  my  granduncle 
refer  to  David  and  Gu£rin  as  the  normal  stu- 
dents, though  without  depreciating  the  merits 
of  the  less  severe  artists  of  the  eighteenth 
century;  to  have  him  speak  of  Ingres,  then 
almost  at  the  height  of  his  power,  as  a  person 
a  little  too  much  tinged  with  sentiment,  as  a 
master  not  sufficiently  strict,  was  allowing  me 
to  enter  into  the  minds  of  my  predecessors  as 
far  back  as  his  own  reached,  and  in  all  my 
thinking  since  then,  I  have  valued  beyond 


C  83  3 

everything  this  knowledge  of  the  manner  of 
looking  at  things  of  a  generation  so  far  back. 
I  feel  as  if  I  had  lived,  myself,  back  this  hun- 
dred years  or  more,  in  the  minds  of  these  few 
people  who  kept  up  for  my  youth  this  training 
and  these  sentiments  of  an  earlier  day. 

"Contrariwise,  and  most  curiously,  my 
granduncle's  son,  my  cousin,  Paul  de  Saint- 
Victor,  was  a  brilliant,  fashionable,  successful 
writer  upon  art  of  all  kinds,  from  the  theatre, 
through  all  literature,  to  painting  and  to  draw- 
ing, and  his  criticisms  were  all  important  then. 
Even  to-day  they  have  a  certain  merit,  though, 
like  all  momentary  writings,  some  of  their 
best  value  has  passed.  Quite  in  opposition  to 
the  views  of  his  father,  my  cousin  stood  by 
and  defended  the  new  men,  more  or  less ;  at 
any  rate  those  especially  of  whom  my  grand- 
uncle  was,  if  I  may  say  so,  afraid.  As  you 
know,  perhaps,  through  writings  of  that  day 
and  this,  my  cousin  was  intimate  with  some 
of  the  best-known  writers,  as,  for  instance, 
Gautier,  so  that  all  these  names,  and  occa- 
sionally themselves,  came  up  to  explain  and 
interest  one  in  the  art  and  the  literature  that 
was  passing  away  and  in  that  which  was  com- 
ing up. 


C  84  3 

«l  was  taken  to  see  the  remarkable  work 
of  a  promising  young  artist,  called  G6r6me.  I 
heard  rumors  of  almost  all,  except  one  of 
whom  I  was  to  learn  a  great  deal  later ;  that 
was  Millet,  whose  name  never  came  up.  But 
of  course  there  was  a  constant  war  and  great 
abyss  between  the  two  ends  of  French  art, 
that  represented  by  M.  Ingres  or  M.  Gerome, 
and  that  of  my  friends  the  painters  of  twenty 
years  before.  In  one  place,  however,  there 
was  an  attempt  at  bringing  these  extremities 
together.  That  was  at  the  house  of  Chass6riau, 
the  artist  who  was  to  die  that  very  year  (if  I 
remember),  but  who  was  apparently  at  that 
time  a  healthy  man,  doing  a  great  deal  already 
'classed/  as  the  French  call  it,  so  that  what- 
ever he  thought  was  of  importance.  You  know 
him  either  well  or  not  at  all  or  very  little,  be- 
cause he  has  left  so  little.  But  if  you  remem- 
ber him  you  will  remember  those  beautiful 
portraits  of  his  sisters,  which  made  one  of  the 
marked  paintings  in  the  Centennial  Exposition 
of  the  great  Paris  show  in  1900.  They  are 
finer  than  the  semi- classical  painting  of  the 
Tepidarium,  which  is  far  from  having  to-day 
the  importance  which  it  had  when  I  was  there. 
What  he  was  doing  then  has  been,  I  suppose, 


C  85  D 

almost  destroyed  in  the  disasters  of  the  Com- 
mune. I  say  almost,  because  a  few  years  ago 
there  were  remains.  Those  are  the  paintings 
decorating  what  is  called,  or  used  to  be  called, 
the  Cour  des  Comptes. 

« These  paintings  are  to  me  of  extraor- 
dinary importance  as  reconciling  the  schools 
which  he  valued  and  as  making  the  future  of 
a  person  at  that  time  quite  unknown,  and,  in 
fact,  not  yet  a  character  in  art;  that  is  Puvis 
de  Chavannes,  who  succeeded  to  a  great  deal 
of  Chasseriau's  ideas  and  training  and  in  fact, 
to  more  than  that,  to  the  drawings  and  studies 
and  the  personal  friendships  of  this  man  whom 
I  used  to  go  and  see.  Another  person  who  I 
think  was  influenced  by  him  was  Moreau.  I 
mean  the  man  whose  museum  of  paintings 
has  been  lately  opened  to  all,  while  so  much 
of  his  work  remained  a  closed  book  even  to 
many  art  lovers. 

"At  Chasseriau's  the  war  raged  all  the 
time.  At  once  one  was  asked  what  one  held 
in  regard  to  M.  Ingres  or  M.  Delacroix,  for 
the  head  of  the  house  had  been  a  favorite  pupil 
of  Ingres,  a  promise  of  the  right  academic  fu- 
ture, and  then  had  been  converted  suddenly, 
like  Paul,  to  Delacroix,  for  whom  he  pro- 


C  86  3 

fessed,  rightly,  an  extraordinary  admiration. 
I  may  regret  to-day  that  neither  through  him 
nor  my  cousin,  nor  my  uncle,  nor  any  social 
connection,  I  saw  the  great  man  whose  works 
I  knew  about  beforehand,  through  literature, 
especially,  and  whose  astounding  paintings 
had  been,  with  those  of  the  old  masters,  one 
of  the  first  great  sensations  of  my  first  days  in 
Paris.  But  I  was  then  and  I  am  yet,  averse  to 
knowing  famous  people,  nor  could  I,  at  that 
date,  have  obtained  from  the  great  man  any 
real  value.  That  I  also  appreciated.  Hero  wor- 
ship is  not  an  educational  basis.  I  doubt  if, 
with  a  person  of  that  importance,  there  would 
have  been  anything  to  learn  until  one  had  at- 
tained already  a  sufficient  capacity  to  absorb 
or  discuss.  So  that  my  regret  is  merely  a  sen- 
timental one,  as  it  is  in  regard  to  many  others 
whom  I  either  accidentally  or  on  purpose  neg- 
lected meeting. 

"  I  was  told  last  year,  by  Sir  Martin  Con- 
way, that  I  had  done  wrong  through  not  using 
later  my  introductions  to  Mr.  Ruskin,  because 
he  was  so  amiable,  but  I  have  not  the  slightest 
doubt  of  my  having  been  right.  We  should 
certainly  have  disagreed  if  there  had  been  any 
discussion.  At  that  later  time,  also,  1872-3, 


C  87  ] 

Mr.  Ruskin  was  especially  aggravating  —  to 
such  an  extent  that  Burne-Jones,  a  special  pet 
of  his,  told  me  that  he  had  given  up  reading 
anything  by  him.  (This  is  a  memory  of  much 
later,  some  nearly  twenty  years.  At  the  time 
I  am  speaking  of,  there  was  no  B-J. ) 

"As  I  have  explained,  my  studies  or  my 
impressions  would  to-day  be  called  literary. 
They  were  so  to  a  certain  extent  but  more 
than  anything  else  they  were  archaeological. 
Travelling  somewhat  in  France,  to  make  the 
acquaintance  of  relatives  in  out  of  the  way 
places,  I  became  naturally  interested  in  learn- 
ing by  eyesight  the  things  that  I  had  read 
about  mediaeval  architecture  and  mediaeval  art 
especially,  because  a  previous  enthusiasm  had 
been  fostered  at  home.  The  acquaintance  of 
a  few  archaeologists  in  out  of  the  way  places 
was  favorable  also.  In  Paris,  on  the  contrary, 
my  few  acquaintances  at  the  time  were  classi- 
cal scholars. 

"The  churches  brought  me  to  the  know- 
ledge of  ancient  glass  and  I  was  able  to  use,  for 
understanding  it,  what  I  had  read  in  the  writ- 
ings of  the  illustrious  Chevreul.  He  had  ex- 
plained more  especially,  years  before,  the 
points  of  ancient  work  in  glass  and  then  he 


[  88  3 

had  written,  as  you  know,  and  perhaps  was 
writing,  on  the  optical  views  of  color.  This 
reading  determined,  I  suppose,  more  than 
anything  else,  the  direction  which  my  painting 
took  some  years  afterward,  when  I  began  to 
paint.  People  like  myself  were  laughed  at  in 
those  days,  even  by  scientific  men.  Later,  of 
course,  the  question  was  to  become  one  of  the 
most  important  in  the  work  of  the  modern 
Frenchmen.  Much  later  I  was  to  use  these 
principles  and  theories  when  I  took  to  work- 
ing in  glass,  and  I  am  still  surprised  that  no 
one  that  I  know  of  has  worked  in  the  same 
way  therein.  My  impression  is  that  Che- 
vreul's  teachings  in  regard  to  ancient  glass 
are  as  far  back  as  the  thirties. 

"  About  my  time  Viollet-le-Duc  was  writ- 
ing and  teaching  and  influencing  many  people, 
but  I  was  out  of  his  line  of  acquaintance  and 
only  began  to  know  him  on  my  return  home. 
The  mediaeval  art  that  he  explained  and  re- 
commended would  not  have  appealed  to  me 
through  his  own  work  and  buildings,  and  I  am 
glad  that  I  did  not  at  that  time  suffer  from 
what  later  annoyed  me  through  his  interpre- 
tations of  the  past.  On  the  contrary,  just  then, 
through  a  tour  in  Belgium,  I  was  able  to  see 


C  89  3 

some  of  the  painting  which  we  may  call 
mediaeval  and  which  begins  modern  art,  and  I 
was,  as  was  right,  steeped  in  admiration.  The 
few  little  drawings  that  I  made  I  still  keep 
as  fair  and  creditable  notes,  few  as  they  are. 
They  show  to  me  that  I  had  a  passable  under- 
standing of  the  beautiful  things  that  I  ad- 
mired. 

"All  this  led  me  to  a  desire  to  understand 
the  mechanical  methods  of  the  early  painters, 
especially  those  who  invented  the  modern  art 
of  painting  in  oils,  and  by  some  chance  of 
good  fortune  I  made  the  acquaintance,  in 
Brussels,  of  Henry  Le  Strange,  who  you  know 
decorated  Ely  Cathedral.  He  was  interested 
in  me  and  in  what  he  had  to  tell  me  practically 
about  manners  of  painting.  I  learned  from 
him  about  painting  in  wax,  for  instance,  and 
was  led  to  read  various  documents  of  informa- 
tion with  regard  to  that  question  of  the  early 
ways  of  painting." 

At  this  point,  approaching  the  subject  of 
La  Farge's  brief  stay  in  the  atelier  of  Couture, 
a  letter  of  his  to  Miss  Barnes  supplies  a  pas- 
sage of  high  importance.  Nothing  is  more  in- 
teresting in  the  psychology  of  La  Farge  than 
the  slow  and  even  unpremeditated  fashion  in 


C  9°  3 

which  he  drifted  into  his  vocation.  Vaguely 
he  seems  to  have  known  his  powers,  yet  to 
have  remained  indifferent  and  uncertain  be- 
fore the  gate  which  he  had  only  to  open  in 
order  to  pass  to  a  happiness  that  he  came  to 
regard  as  one  of  the  most  blessed  gifts  of  the 
gods.  Writing  to  Miss  Barnes  of  the  choice 
gently  forced  upon  him  in  Paris,  in  1856,  he 
says :  — 

"  At  some  time  or  other  during  that  year, 
when,  I  cannot  remember,  my  father  ( through 
my  mother,  I  think,  so  that  I  have  never 
known  what  he  really  thought)  advised  me 
to  study  painting,  of  which  I  was  rather  fond, 
on  the  ground  —  which  was  quite  certain  — 
that  I  was  wasting  my  time  and  I  think  with 
a  faint  suggestion,  not  to  me  but  to  the  family 
mind,  that  perhaps  I  was  living  in  a  little 
faster  way  than  their  habits  accepted ;  which 
in  reality  was  perfect  'rot.'  I  was  like  all 
other  young  men,  but,  differently  from  many 
other  young  men,  I  was  enormously  inter- 
ested in  everything  except  strict  science  and 
the  mathematical  side  of  knowledge.  I  was 
always  very  anxious  to  please  my  father  as 
a  matter  of  sentiment,  and  very  willing  to  go 
and  learn  the  practice  of  painting,  about  which 


Christ  and  Nicodemus 


C  91  3 

I  used  to  hear  a  great  deal,  because  a  great 
deal  of  my  time  was  spent  with  people  whose 
pleasures  and  interests  were  literary  and 
artistic." 

How  he  decided  to  enter  a  particular  studio, 
and  in  what  mood  he  took  up  his  task  there, 
he  goes  on  to  tell  in  the  narrative  upon  which 
I  have  already  drawn :  — 

"  My  American  acquaintances  were  then 
very  much  inclined  to  the  painter  Couture, 
who  had  quite  a  number  of  Americans  in  his 
studio  and  had  been  the  master  of  several  of 
them,  well  known  in  Paris  and  having  quite  a 
position  of  their  own.  One  of  these,  Edward 
May,  took  me  to  the  master  one  day  and  I 
explained  to  him  what  I  wished,  which  was  to 
get  a  practical  knowledge  of  painting,  as  prac- 
ticed by  him.  I  also  made  him  understand  that 
I  was  doing  this  as  a  study  of  art  in  general 
and  had  no  intention  of  becoming  a  painter. 
This  he  at  first  thought  preposterous  and  was 
probably  somewhat  astonished  at  the  young- 
ster who  laid  out  this  programme  in  such  an 
unusual  manner.  But  I  argued  with  him,  and 
won  his  good  graces,  so  that  the  next  day  in 
the  early  morning  I  entered  the  studio  and 
took  my  place  with  the  others.  I  was  given,  in 


C  92  3 

the  usual  manner,  by  the  student  in  control,  a 
seat  and  place,  paper,  etc.,  and  I  began  draw- 
ing from  the  model  before  me.  There  being 
no  one  to  guide  me,  and  feeling  that  the  way 
the  others  drew  was  not  mine,  I  went  on  my 
own  way. 

«  That  day  or  next  came  in  the  great  man, 
who,  instead  of  objecting  to  my  work  having 
so  little  in  common  with  those  following  his 
system,  was  pleased  to  say,  on  the  contrary, 
that  mine  was  the  only  one  that  really  gave 
the  motion  of  the  model.  To-day,  when  I  look 
at  the  drawing,  I  can  see  why  the  master  re- 
cognized something  in  the  work  of  the  boy 
which  had  a  value  of  its  own.  He  told  me  to 
go  ahead  and  that  the  others  'tried  to  be  little 
Coutures,  as  if  a  little  Couture  was  worth  any- 
thing.' 

"I  was  impatient  to  paint  according  to 
school  ways,  for  which  I  had  come,  but  the 
routine  of  the  school  demanded  drawing  in  the 
Couture  way,  and  as  I  unfolded  my  plan  to 
him  he  thought  I  might  wait  till  the  next  year, 
and  meanwhile  go  on  studying  the  variations 
of  drawing  by  the  old  masters,  many  of  which, 
as  you  know,  are  in  the  Louvre.  This  I  did  for 
a  time,  returning  occasionally  to  the  studio. 


C  93  ] 

On  the  whole,  I  did  not  stay  there  more  than  a 
couple  of  weeks." 

Before  leaving  this  episode  in  his  career  I 
must  rescue  from  a  talk  of  ours  an  interesting 
souvenir  of  his  stay  with  Couture.  Puvis  came 
in  one  day,  wanting  a  model,  and  he  chose  La 
Farge.  "Perhaps,"  he  said  to  me,  "it  was  some- 
thing in  my  face.  I  don't  know  what  I  posed 
for.  Some  study,  perhaps.  It  would  be  amus- 
ing to  discover  myself  somewhere  in  his  works, 
if  one  could  look  them  over  in  a  lot  of  photo- 
graphs." Released  from  obligations  which,  as 
we  have  seen,  he  had  only  lightly  assumed,  as 
it  were  in  passing,  he  set  forth  upon  his  trav- 
els. Speaking  of  the  copies  of  drawings  by  the 
old  masters  which  he  made  at  Munich  and 
Dresden,  he  continues  :  — 

"  These  copies  have  some  of  the  qualities 
of  the  originals,  showing  that  at  that  time  I 
had  become  sensitive  to  the  differences  of  the 
artists.  You  must  remember  that  there  were 
no  photographs  and  that  one  had  to  travel,  as 
I  did,  many  hundreds  of  miles  and  many  days' 
journey  to  find  these  things  of  which,  now, 
we  have  duplicates  in  our  portfolios.  Study  of 
the  drawings  of  the  old  masters  seemed  to  me 
a  logical  method  of  learning  and  learning  very 


seriously.  If  I  copied  the  painting  for  which 
the  drawing  had  been  made  I  could  only  copy 
the  surface,  without  knowing  exactly  how  the 
master  had  made  this  result.  But  I  knew  that 
in  the  master's  drawings  and  studies  for  a 
given  work  I  met  him  intimately,  saw  into  his 
mind,  and  learned  his  intentions  and  his  char- 
acter, and  what  was  great  and  what  was  defi- 
cient. 

"  Meanwhile,  thereby,  I  kept  in  touch  with 
that  greatest  of  all  characters  of  art,  style, 
not  the  style  of  the  Academy  or  of  any  one 
man,  but  the  style  of  all  the  schools,  the  man- 
ner of  looking  at  art  which  is  common  to  all 
important  personalities,  however  fluctuating 
its  form  may  be. 

"  In  Denmark,  besides  making  the  acquaint- 
ance of  some  of  the  painters,  I  made  some 
studies  in  the  Copenhagen  gallery.  Among 
others  I  made  a  fairly  careful  study  of  the  Rem- 
brandt there,  the  'Supper  at  Emmaus.'  I  had 
plenty  of  time  to  do  it  in.  The  summer  days 
are  endless.  I  was  alone  and  the  guardians 
treated  me  as  a  spoiled  child,  bringing  me 
lunch  and  allowing  me  to  sponge  out  the  sur- 
faces of  the  great  master,  whose  work,  fortu- 
nately, had  not  been  varnished  or  retouched. 


C  95  ] 

As  I  did  not  consider  that  I  knew  enough 
about  oils  to  copy  anything  of  importance,  I 
painted  in  water  color,  in  the  English  way,  as 
I  had  been  taught.  I  was  enabled  to  learn  a 
great  deal  of  the  methods  of  Rembrandt  and 
to  connect  them  with  my  studies,  outside  of 
any  idea  of  practice  as  yet.  I  have  lately  re- 
covered this  water  color,  which  had  been  lost 
for  many  years.  It  came  back  to  me  just  fifty 
years  after  I  had  finished  it,  and  I  had  finished 
it  on  the  anniversary  of  the  birth  of  Rem- 
brandt, two  hundred  years  before. 

"Rubens  I  followed  in  Belgium,  later, 
trying  to  see  every  painting  of  his  throughout 
the  whole  kingdom ;  and  as  many  of  his  pupils 
as  I  could  gather  in.  As  far  as  having  seen  the 
master's  work,  I  can  say  that  I  have  seen  the 
greater  mass  of  it.  I  made  no  studies ;  in  fact 
Rubens  is  not  one  to  work  from  easily,  nor 
would  it  have  been  available  for  me  to  imi- 
tate, without  a  great  knowledge  of  painting, 
the  tremendous  flow  of  color  and  light  so 
gloriously  spread  over  that  enormous  space  of 
painted  surface,  either  all  his  own  or  that  of 
his  pupils  also.  One  thing  I  felt  to  be  astonish- 
ing, because  I  had  not  thought  it  out,  and  that 
was,  how  beautifully  the  work  of  Rubens  con- 


C  96  ] 

nected  with  the  early  mediaeval  paintings  that 
I  so  much  admired.  And  yet  one  might  sup- 
pose the  greatest  difference  between  the  deli- 
cacy and  the  closeness  of  the  study  of  the 
older  men,  their  reticence  and  their  care,  and 
the  apparently  reckless  ease  of  the  last  great 
Fleming.  But  I  learned  how  careful  in  reality 
was  this  generous  abandonment  to  energy, 
how  the  first  preparation  determined  the  fu- 
ture ;  and  how  prudent  that  first  preparation 
was. 

"I  did  not  return  to  Couture's.  I  do  not 
know  what  I  should  have  done  had  I  remained 
in  Europe  and  in  Paris.  But  I  did  not  admire 
his  work  or  his  views  of  art  and  he  annoyed 
me,  notwithstanding  his  friendliness,  by  his 
constant  running  down  of  other  artists  greater 
than  himself.  Delacroix  and  Rousseau  were 
special  objects  of  insult  or  depreciation.  He 
never  referred  to  Millet,  for  whom  some  of 
his  best  pupils,  among  others,  William  Hunt, 
had  left  him — a  fact  which  he  never  forgave, 
as  I  learned  later.  I  mention  my  indifference 
to  my  master,  which  was  more  than  indiffer- 
ence, all  the  more  because  it  is  not  usual.  Let 
me  add  that  I  was  not  the  only  one.  Among 
others,  I  take  it  that  Puvis,  whom  we  saw  once 


C  97  3 

or  twice  there,  must  have  felt  that  way.  Some 
of  his  first  work,  even  that  announcing  his 
future  powers,  has  some  mark  of  Couture's 
methods.  I  suppose  that  it  is  almost  impos- 
sible for  a  serious  mind  to  pass  through  some 
painter's  studio  without  getting  a  little  of  his 
method  or  manner  or  something,  if  it  is  worth 
while.  I  take  it  that  that  is  one  of  the  charms 
of  the  Italians  and  also  that  we  would  realize 
the  cause  better  if  we  knew  more  of  their 
actual  lives.  Some  of  the  things  that  catch  are 
purely  mechanical,  but  as  the  art  of  painting  is 
a  mechanism,  that  mechanical  influence  is  an 
important  one.  The  Japanese  have  that  thor- 
oughly in  their  identifying  the  school  with  the 
shape  of  the  brush. 

"  Whatever  I  wished  or  intended  or  thought 
of  was  put  aside  by  my  return  home,  deter- 
mined by  my  father's  wishing  me  back  on  ac- 
count of  his  illness.  I  returned  in  the  winter  of 
1 857-8,  having  spent  a  part  of  the  autumn  in 
England  on  my  way  home.  I  had  plenty  of 
time  to  give  to  looking  at  paintings,  because 
almost  every  one  for  whom  I  had  letters  was 
away  from  London.  After  a  little  while  I  went 
to  Manchester  and  spent  several  weeks  at  the 
great  Exposition,  which  was  the  first  of  the 


C  98  ] 

special  exhibitions  of  paintings  collected  from 
private  and  royal  galleries.  It  is  still  remem- 
bered as  the  'Manchester  Exhibition '  and  is 
one  of  the  turning  points  of  the  public's  ac- 
quaintance with  the  art  of  many  countries.  As 
you  know,  the  wealthy  collections  of  England 
were  poured  into  the  great  show,  and  certainly 
the  pleasure  of  seeing,  side  by  side,  the  great 
Titian  and  the  great  Velasquez  and  the  great 
Rubens  in  all  their  contradiction,  was  an  edu- 
cation for  any  intelligent  and  sympathetic 
mind.  We  saw  there  the  Velasquez,  the  figure 
of  the  woman  lately  bought  for  the  National 
Gallery.  It  had  come  out  of  the  shade  and 
went  back  to  it  these  fifty  years.  But  I  am 
pleased  to  think  that  my  little  memorandum 
sketch  has  some  recognition  of  it,  however 
careless. 

"  But  besides  the  miles  of  old  masters,  there 
were  some  of  the  quite  new ;  the  pre-Raphael- 
ites,  whom  I  knew  of  by  reading  and  by  some 
prints  but  whom  now  I  could  see  carefully. 
They  made  a  very  great  and  important  im- 
pression upon  me,  which  later  influenced  me 
in  my  first  work  when  I  began  to  paint.  But 
of  that  I  had  no  warning." 

It  was  still  without  any  warning  in  a  broader 


C  99  3 

sense,  without  presage  of  the  ambitions  that 
were  soon  to  burn  in  his  breast  and  the 
achievements  to  which  he  was  to  push  for- 
ward, that  he  took  ship  and  returned  to  Amer- 
ica. 


IV 


THE  EVOLUTION  OF  AN 
ARTIST 

IF  there  is  one  thing  more  than  another 
which  I  hope  has  been  made  plain  in  the 
preceding  chapter  it  is  that  none  of  La  Farge's 
experiences  abroad  had  crystallized  his  ideas 
of  art  into  a  formula.  Europe  had  not  fitted 
him  out  with  a  technique.  It  had  awakened  in 
him,  and  to  some  extent  had  organized,  a  habit 
of  mind.  Potent  influences  were  singing  in  his 
head  like  wine.  He  could  not  return  unscathed 
from  his  contact  with  the  impetuous  adherents 
of  the  romantic  movement.  But  he  was  com- 
mitted to  nothing,  neither  to  the  " rectitude' ' 
of  Ingres  nor  to  the  prodigal  method  of  that 
master's  abhorred  rival,  neither  to  the  flat- 
brush  trick  of  the  Salon  and  the  gray  light  of 
that  official  tabernacle,  nor  to  the  freer  atmo- 
sphere which  the  Barbizon  men  were  carry- 
ing into  vogue.  He  was,  instead,  in  the  mood 
to  think  it  all  over. 

Anatole  France  has  a  saying  on  Gavarni 
which  is  absolutely  applicable  to  La  Farge : 


John  La  Farge  in  1885 


C  101  3 

"He  thinks,  and  that  is  a  cause  of  wonder  in 
the  midst  of  all  this  world  of  artists  who  are 
content  with  seeing  and  feeling.' '  The  point  is 
one  of  the  greatest  importance,  to  be  kept  con- 
stantly in  mind ;  and  we  have  at  the  same  time 
to  recognize  the  equilibrium  established  in  his 
artistic  nature.  That  he  thought  much  did  not 
prevent  his  seeing  and  feeling.  It  acted  both 
as  a  check  and  as  a  fertilizing  influence;  it 
stayed  his  hand  from  relapsing  into  routine, 
and,  always  unfolding  to  him  new  phenomena 
in  the  worlds  of  nature  and  art,  spurred  him  to 
redoubled  efforts.  The  duality  of  his  genius  is 
sharply  expressed  in  some  of  his  remarks  to 
me.  "  Were  it  not  for  our  learning  by  instinct 
and  not  by  thought  we  should  never  do  any- 
thing. .  .  .  Painting  is,  more  than  people  think, 
a  question  of  brains.  A  really  intelligent  man 
would  not  have  to  see,  if  he  could  only  find  his 
place,  any  more  than  a  musician  is  obliged  to 
hear  the  music  he  writes.  Of  course  the  actual 
execution  modifies  the  more  intellectual  view 
within  which  the  artist  works."  Yet  he  knew 
as  well  as  any  painter  that  ever  lived  the  tran- 
scendent necessity  of  purely  visual  operations. 
Once,  when  he  was  anxious  about  the  com- 
pletion of  a  decoration  and  the  securing  of 


C  102  3 

some  proper  place  in  which  to  exhibit  it,  he 
wrote  to  me :  "  My  studios  are  too  small  to  be 
quite  certain  of  the  effect  of  the  work  at  a  dis- 
tance. I  mean  by  that  that  it  is  more  prudent 
to  go  by  one's  eye  rather  than  by  reasoning, 
which,  so  far,  I  have  to  work  with."  But  where 
many  a  painter  thinks  that  it  is  enough  "to  go 
by  one's  eye,"  La  Farge  took  that  for  granted, 
as  one  of  the  rudimentary  truths,  and,  steep- 
ing himself  in  reflection,  brought  all  manner 
of  constructive  thought  to  the  development 
of  his  work. 

He  was  the  most  assiduous  experimentalist 
in  art  that  we  have  ever  had.  He  came  back 
from  Europe  a  student  and  in  1903,  when  he 
inaugurated  the  Scammon  lectures  at  the  Art 
Institute  of  Chicago,  he  began  by  saying  to 
the  budding  artists  in  his  audience,  "Notwith- 
standing my  greater  age,  I  am  still  a  student." 
Letters  written  in  his  last  illness  beautifully 
illustrate  the  joyous,  almost  boyish,  zest  with 
which  he  had  always  talked  to  me  of  his  in- 
terest in  pigments  and  processes.  u  I  had  a  bad 
yesterday  and  night  and  morning  to-day,"  he 
writes.  "It's  all  I  can  do  to  hold  on."  But 
even  then  he  was  busying  himself  over  the 
cataloguing  of  nearly  a  hundred  water  colors 


[  los  ] 

that  were  going  off  to  an  exhibition  in  Boston, 
and,  with  his  accustomed  buoyancy,  lifting 
him  above  ill  health  to  the  things  he  loved,  he 
goes  on  to  say,  "In  all  these  things  of  misery 
I  have  had  a  great  consolation.  I  have  found 
the  Japanese  and  Chinese  paints  chosen  for 
me  by  Okakura  some  years  ago — all,  of 
course,  of  great  purity  and  of  long  tradition. 
Such  a  <Kano'  blue !  The  exact  Chinese  ver- 
milion of  the  extremest  best!  This  is  not 
necessary  but  it  may  help  if  I  live,  —  and  it  is 
especially  valuable  as  a  superstition,  because  it 
looks  as  if  luck  smiled  a  moment  through  the 
clouds.  The  colors  of  a.  d.  812,  of  a.  d. 
1340!" 

Another  letter,  written  at  the  same  time, 
shows  him  struggling  under  the  same  burden 
but  again  losing  himself  in  his  art,  and  pausing, 
too,  in  spite  of  pain,  to  philosophize :  — 

"I  am  working  very  hard  at  *  finishing' 
some  water  colors.  ...  It  is  very  hard  work. 
Two  or  three  are  important,  perhaps  good. 
The  rest,  I  hope,  are  amusing.  There  are 
some  experiments  among  them,  because  I 
have  found  that  when  I  was  ill  and  could  not, 
or  thought  I  could  not,  go  about  or  get  on  my 
steps  before  my  painting,  I  would  sit  and  do 


[  104  ] 

little  things  in  size.  For  me  many  of  them 
are  my  best  work,  as  they  are  for  everybody. 

"  Have  you  ever  seen  my  reconstitution  of 
Chinese  painting?  I  defy  a  Chinaman  to  deny 
that  I  have  used  correctly  his  basis.  Of  course 
I  can't  work  his  technique  and  be  honest,  nor 
can  I  even  quite  use  some  of  the  things  I  most 
admire  in  him  —  let  us  say  his  'color/  for  in- 
stance. I  have  to  be  true  to  6  us '  —  paint  or 
draw  with  the  knowledge  of  the  world.  Any 
one  who  is  a  <  primitive '  to-day  is  in  so  far  a 
fraud.  But  then,  fortunately,  those  games  are 
not  the  games  of  the  better  men,  who  are  glad 
to  be  free  and  not  imitative.  And  that,  you 
know,  can  be  done  even  within  the  enclosure 
of  a  <  school/  or  the  following  more  or  less  of 
a  beloved  master.  Chasseriau  used  to  tell  me 
that  it  was  good  to  leave  a  cherished  method 
behind  one  and  sail  into  the  blue,  as  he  did 
after  Delacroix,  pursued  by  Ingres'  maledic- 
tions. Like  the  story  of  Theseus  and  Ariadne. 
But  for  a  very  sick  man  I  write  too  much.  A 
bientot,  I  hope." 

I  remember  his  appreciation  of  Dupre"s  de- 
finition of  art,  as  the  expression  of  the  paint- 
er's reverence  and  admiration  for  what  he  sees 
in  nature.  "It  is  never,"  he  added,  "the  mere 


C  1Q5  1 

representation  of  what  we  see."  The  ideal  he 
believed  in,  and  followed  in  his  practice,  was 
that  which  he  describes  in  « An  Artist's  Let- 
ters from  Japan,"  in  that  tribute  which  he  pays 
to  the  Oriental  craftsman  lavishing  all  that  is 
in  him  upon  the  execution  of  a  little  netsuke  or 
inro.  "And  when  he  has  finished,  —  because 
to  do  more  or  less  would  not  be  to  finish  it,  — 
he  has  given  me,  besides  the  excellency  of 
what  we  call  workmanship,  which  he  must 
give  me  because  that  is  the  bargain  between 
us  —  he  has  given  me  his  desires,  his  memo- 
ries, his  pleasures,  his  dreams,  all  the  little  oc- 
currences of  so  much  life."  Elsewhere,  in  one 
of  the  lectures  going  to  form  his  "  Consider- 
ations on  Painting,"  he  develops  the  same 
point  and  gives  it  a  certain  autobiographical 
turn.  "After  all,"  he  says,  "remember  that 
what  I  tell  you  is  the  result  of  life,  whether  in 
thought  or  in  action ;  and  that  I  am  only  able 
to  give  principles  and  foundations  for  think- 
ing, through  having  visited  certain  regions 
of  thought,  through  surprises  that  have  fallen 
upon  me,  and  that  what  confidence  I  have  to- 
day in  talking  to  you  is  based  on  no  a  priori 
certainty  that  I  had  it  all  before  beginning." 
These  numerous  citations  are  made,  of 


C  106  3 

course,  with  but  one  purpose,  to  expose  La 
Farge's  point  of  view.  The  point  of  view  is 
everything,  and,  in  the  case  of  a  genius  so 
complex  as  his,  no  evidence  is  too  slight,  too 
fugitive,  to  serve  us.  Moreover,  knowledge 
of  the  breadth  of  view  which  governed  all  his 
artistic  proceedings  supplies  us  with  a  touch- 
stone especially  desirable  at  the  present  time, 
when  the  student  has  to  be  on  his  guard  against 
the  oracles  toward  whom  he  would  naturally 
turn  for  guidance.  There  are  some  painters, 
very  clever  painters,  too,  who  can  sink  to  well- 
nigh  fathomless  depths  of  fatuity  on  the  sub- 
ject of  what  constitutes  the  art  of  painting.  It 
is  easy  to  understand  how  they  have  fallen  into 
a  rather  circumscribed  way  of  thinking  on  that 
subject.  Thirty  odd  years  ago,  when  the  mi- 
gration of  our  young  artists  to  Paris  had  set 
in,  but  the  public  taste  for  the  painted  anec- 
dote had  not  abated,  the  returned  American 
found  himself  placed  more  or  less  on  the  de- 
fensive ;  and,  often  without  knowing  it,  he  has 
been  on  the  defensive  ever  since.  Commended 
by  his  French  master  for  a  well-managed  pas- 
sage in  technique,  he  came  back  defiantly  to 
flaunt  his  manual  dexterity  in  the  faces  of  the 
collectors,  who  were  then  clinging  with  pious 


[  io7  ] 

faith  to  the  "Kiss  Mummy"  picture.  He  has 
not  only  gone  on  painting  the  morceau  but  has 
settled  down  to  the  touching  belief  that  there 
is  something  talismanic  about  it.  There  is 
something  talismanic  about  it,  in  the  right 
hands,  when  the  instinct  for  beauty  and  for 
style  is  so  strong  that  it  raises  technique  to  a 
higher  power.  La  Farge  himself  has  a  good 
saying  to  stiffen  the  back  of  the  painter  who 
will  listen  to  nothing  that  seems  even  faintly 
to  disparage  the  purely  technical  function. 
"The  touch  of  the  brush  is  so  difficult  when  it 
comes  to  be  a  very  successful  thing,  that  it  be- 
comes ennobled."  But  this  is  a  very  different 
thing  from  making  a  fetish  of  facture. 

La  Farge  knew  all  about  facture.  No  other 
man  of  his  time  knew  more.  All  his  life  long 
he  was  interested  in  its  problems  and  it  is  sug- 
gestive to  see  how,  in  his  dealings  with  the  old 
masters,  he  puts  his  finger  on  whatever  pre- 
figurements  they  disclose  of  our  modern  con- 
noisseurship  in  technique.  In  his  essay  on  Ra- 
phael, coming  to  treat  of  "The  Mass  of  Bol- 
sena,"  he  calls  the  reader's  attention  to  the 
portrait  of  Pope  Julius,  "painted  with  the  ap- 
parent velocity  and  ease  which  we  credit  to 
such  a  man  as  Velasquez/'  and  he  used  to  say 


[  108  3 

that  when  he  had  sat  at  the  feet  of  Rembrandt, 
copying  the  "Supper  at  Emmaus,"  in  Copen- 
hagen, he  received  a  technical  lesson  that 
had  never  ceased  to  affect  his  practice.  What 
he  would  have  repudiated  with  vigor  would 
have  been  the  assertion  that  Rembrandt,  or 
any  other  single  master,  could  have  taught 
him  the  whole  duty  of  the  artist,  and,  con- 
versely, it  was  impossible  for  him  dogmatically 
to  assert  that  any  given  mode  was  wrong. 
In  fact,  he  regarded  such  assertion  with  an 
amused  tolerance,  feeling  a  little  sorry  for  those 
who  made  it  a  habit,  and  assuming,  in  kindly 
fashion,  that  by  and  by  they  would  grow  out 
of  their  provincialism.  There  were  so  many 
ways  of  caressing  the  surface  of  a  painting ! 
When  I  mentioned  to  him  the  discovery  of  an 
accomplished  young  painter  that  Fra  Angelico 
did  not  know  how  to  paint,  it  greatly  tickled 
him  and  he  recalled  the  similar  remark  made 
by  a  junior  of  his,  full  of  Impressionism  and 
the  like,  when  they  were  standing  in  the 
Louvre  before  a  picture  by  the  devout  Flor- 
entine. "I  wondered,,,  he  said,  "how  my 
young  companion  would  have  gone  to  work  to 
get  just  the  blue  of  that  robe,  just  the  white  of 
that  wall,  and  to  draw  just  that  line  against  the 


[  109  ] 

background.,,  There  was  no  answer  to  his 
questions,  "and,"  he  added  to  me,  "I  have 
often  wondered  how  I  myself  could  have  done 
those  things."  He  was  full  of  wonder  when  he 
came  back  from  Europe  in  his  youth.  For  the 
manner  in  which  he  gradually  solved  his  pro- 
blem we  turn  again  to  his  own  narrative. 

"I  knew  that  on  my  return  I  should  go 
back  to  reading  law;  which  I  accordingly  did, 
though  stealing  as  much  time  as  I  could  for 
visits  to  some  of  my  new  friends,  the  painters 
and  architects.  They  made  a  manner  of  link 
with  Europe,  at  least  the  architects  did, 
Richard  Hunt  and  his  two  or  three  students, 
George  Post  and  Van  Brunt,  and  William 
Ware  and  Richard  Gambrill. 

"  I  only  touched  the  merest  corners  of 
what  was  being  done.  I  did  not  know  of  our 
pre-Raphaelites  here,  as  a  body,  though  I 
spent  some  time  with  Stillman,  who  was  one 
of  their  prophets.  I  knew  Boughton,  who  was 
to  leave  us  soon,  and  a  few  of  the  Hudson 
River  men. 

"In  the  middle  of  the  next  year  I  began  to 
be  a  little  freer  of  myself ;  I  saw  a  little  more 
of  the  few  artists,  and  even  took  a  room  at  the 
Studio  Building  in  Tenth  Street,  where  occa- 


C  no  3 

sionally  I  made  some  little  drawings,  and 
even  tried  to  paint  on  a  small  and  amateurish 
scale,  but  I  recognized  that  I  needed  a  train- 
ing in  the  practice  of  painting.  I  had  even 
thought  of  going  back  again  to  Europe  to  go 
through  a  certain  discipline,  which  if  not  ab- 
solutely necessary  is  still  valuable.  It  is  pre- 
ferable to  have  very  good  teaching  and  the 
best,  but  even  a  poor  one  in  such  a  mechani- 
cal art  has  enormous  value. 

"  Talking  of  this  one  day  to  Richard  Hunt, 
merely  because  his  French  training  had  made 
him  acquainted  with  and  respectful  of  the 
artists  of  France  whom  I  especially  liked,  he 
suggested  that  I  might  like  to  be  with  his 
brother,  William,  who  thought  of  taking  some 
pupils,  who  was  settled  in  Newport,  and  with 
whom  I  could  continue  the  practical  teachings 
that  I  had  almost  begun  at  Couture's  studio ; 
Hunt  being,  of  course,  a  favorite  and  brilliant 
pupil  of  Couture's.  I  met  thereupon  Bill  Hunt, 
saw  some  piece  of  his  work,  and  was  pleased 
both  with  the  man  and  with  what  he  did  and 
said,  and  with  all  of  that  very  charming  char- 
acter, so  that  in  the  spring  of  1859  I  came  to 
Newport  to  try  the  experiment,  and  began 
in  a  little  more  serious  way  than  before. 


C  111  3 

«  But  a  disappointment  was  in  store  for  me, 
and  it  was  this,  —  that  Hunt  had  abandoned 
the  practice  of  Couture,  which  was  what  I 
wished  to  continue.  He  was  then  arranging, 
as  men  often  do,  other  influences  to  suit  his 
previous  ones  and  was  painting  in  a  manner 
which,  however  interesting  to  me,  was  not 
what  I  had  come  to  get.  But  his  general  influ- 
ence was  so  good,  and  the  pleasure  of  de- 
voting almost  all  my  time  to  painting  as  a  task 
under  a  teacher,  kept  me  satisfied  with  my 
momentary  position.  And  there  was  always 
something  to  learn  from  a  new  man  whom  I 
liked,  to  learn  or  to  share  with  him,  for  we 
found  more  and  more  common  admirations. 
He  introduced  me  to  the  knowledge  of  the 
works  of  Millet,  of  which  he  had  many,  in- 
cluding the  famous  <  Sower/  and  very  many 
drawings,  and  more  especially  to  the  teach- 
ings, the  sayings,  and  the  curious  spiritual  life 
which  a  great  artist  like  Millet  opens  to  his 
devotees.  Every  day  some  remark  of  Millet's 
was  quoted,  some  way  of  his  was  noticed, 
some  part  of  his  life  was  told ;  he  was,  in  this 
way,  in  those  studios,  a  patron  saint. 

"  Notwithstanding,  though  I  even  copied  a 
Millet  or  two,  I  was  firmly  resolved  against 


following  him  either  with  or  without  Hunt,  in 
the  methods  which  were  especially  developed 
by  the  great  Frenchman.  His  previous  meth- 
ods, which  one  sees  more  distinctly  in  some 
of  his  landscapes,  and,  of  course,  in  his  early 
work,  were  nearer  what  I  had  been  looking 
for,  however  less  poetic  and  more  common- 
place they  might  be,  but  my  aim  was  study 
and  the  acquaintance  with  methods  of  work 
that  would  connect  generally  with  the  past, 
not  with  new  formulae  which  were  abridg- 
ments. So  that  to  some  extent  I  had  to  fight 
out  my  own  issue,  and  Hunt  and  I  disagreed, 
but  we  had  so  many  common  beliefs  and 
Hunt's  was  so  charming  a  mind,  that  often  he 
was  the  first  and  only  one  to  praise  me  when 
I  departed  from  his  method,  as  from  his  gen- 
eral views. 

"All  this  refers  to  landscape  more  particu- 
larly, because  the  closed  light  of  the  studio  is 
more  the  same  for  every  one,  and  for  all  day, 
and  its  problems,  however  important,  are  ex- 
tremely narrow,  compared  with  those  of  out 
of  doors.  There  I  wished  to  apply  principles 
of  light  and  color  of  which  I  had  learned  a 
little.  I  wished  my  studies  from  nature  to  in- 
dicate something  of  this,  to  be  free  from  re- 


C  "3  1 

cipes,  as  far  as  possible,  and  to  indicate  very 
carefully,  in  every  part,  the  exact  time  of  day 
and  circumstances  of  light.  This  of  course  is 
the  most  ambitious  of  all  possible  ideas,  and 
though  attempted  to  some  extent  through 
several  centuries  from  time  to  time  it  is  only 
recently  that  all  the  problems  have  been 
stated,  in  intention  at  least,  by  modern  paint- 
ing. 

"In  a  certain  way  Hunt  recognized  the 
value  of  the  ideas  and  the  value  of  their  result, 
but  his  aim  was  quite  the  other  way;  and  that 
was  to  find  the  recipe  which  would  be  suffi- 
cient for  noting  what  he  wished  to  do.  Herein 
he  was  following  the  steps  of  Millet,  but  as 
Millet  himself  objected  to  him,  "That  is  all 
very  good,  but  what  have  you  got  to  say  with 
it?"  This  is  not  to  say  that  Hunt  had  not  a 
right  to  do  whatever  he  wished  in  such  a  way, 
especially  as  for  him  in  general  the  future  was 
merely  as  the  past  in  representing  figures  and 
portraits,  and  he  gave  up  the  entire  question 
of  the  place  in  which  the  figures  lived,  air  and 
light  and  space.  We  used  to  talk,  however, 
about  it  all. 

"To  recall  all  these  discussions  would  be  a 
lengthy  matter,  but  it  is  necessary  to  indicate 


C  "4  3 

this  great  divergence  of  point  of  view.  We 
had,  of  course,  certain  previous  teachings  in 
common  and  certain  mechanisms.  We  used 
similar  paints,  and  canvas  which  I  imported ; 
we  made  a  shadow  of  flesh  in  the  same  way 
occasionally  and  we  used  the  same  brushes. 
We  also  used  similar  grounds  to  paint  on,  until 
I  began  to  change  according  to  circumstances. 
In  fact,  I  suggested  to  Hunt  the  preparing  of 
his  paintings  in  a  way  that  he  had  not  so  far 
practiced,  and  I  occasionally  helped  him  in  one 
or  two  of  these  preparations,  as  did  some  of 
his  other  pupils. 

"  I,  too,  the  next  year,  began  to  paint  in  a 
different  way  according  to  this  notion,  a  very 
elementary  one.  But  the  main  practical  point 
in  which  we  differed  was  this,  which  serves  as 
a  type  or  note  of  diversity:  Hunt  thought  it 
useless  to  carry  the  refinement  of  tone  and 
color  to  the  extent  which  I  aimed  at  in  my 
studies,  telling  me  that  there  would  not  be  one 
in  a  hundred  or  five  hundred  artists  capable  of 
appreciating  such  differences  of  accuracy  — 
their  eyes  and  their  training  would  not  be  suf- 
ficient. This  objection  seemed  to  me,  as  I  told 
him,  exactly  the  reason  why  I  should,  for  cer- 
tain, aim  at  these  variations  from  recipe.  So 


C  "5  3 

much  the  better,  if  only  one  man  in  a  thou- 
sand could  see  it;  I  should  then  have  exactly 
what  I  wanted  in  the  appeal  to  the  man  who 
knew  and  to  the  mind  like  mine. 

"The  first  and  special  work  I  did  according 
to  my  liking  was  in  a  few  months  after  coming 
to  Hunt.  The  first  distinctive  paintings  were 
a  couple  of  landscapes  painted  in  December, 
1859,  and  perhaps  as  late  as  January,  i860. 
They  still  remain  and  you  can  see  one  of  them 
at  Mrs.  Gardner's  and  one  at  Sir  William 
Van  Home's.  They  are  each  studies  out  of 
the  window  to  give  the  effect  and  appearance 
of  looking  out  of  the  window  and  our  not  being 
in  the  same  light  as  the  landscape.  And  also 
to  indicate  very  exactly  the  time  of  day  and 
the  exact  condition  of  the  light  in  the  sky. 
This  to  be  done  without  using  the  methods  of 
mere  light  and  dark,  and  thus  throwing  away 
the  studio  practice  for  any  previous  habit. 

"This,  of  course,  is  contrary  to  most  of  the 
manners  of  making  studies,  though  to-day  it 
would  be  better  understood  than  it  could  have 
been  then.  I  note  that  I  had  then,  and  have  no 
objection  now,  and  much  admiration,  for  the 
reverse  way  of  doing,  and  of  using  a  conven- 
tional method.  Of  course  that  would  be  if  the 


C  116  1 

thing  were  beautiful  and  in  some  relation,  as, 
for  instance,  Millet's  later  work,  while  his 
early  work  was  more  in  the  meaning  of  my 
studies.  Therein  and  in  the  work  I  did  during 
my  time  with  Hunt,  that  is  to  say  in  1859, 1 
aimed  at  making  a  realistic  study  of  painting, 
keeping  to  myself  the  designs  and  attempts, 
serious  or  slight,  which  might  have  a  meaning 
more  than  that  of  a  strict  copy  from  nature. 
I  painted  flowers  to  get  the  relation  between 
the  softness  and  brittleness  of  the  flower  and 
the  hardness  of  the  bowl  or  whatever  it  might 
be  in  which  the  flower  might  be  placed.  In- 
stead of  arranging  my  subject,  which  is  the 
usual  studio  way,  I  had  it  placed  for  me  by 
chance,  with  any  background  and  any  light, 
leaving,  for  instance,  the  choice  of  flowers  and 
vase  to  the  servant  girl  or  groom  or  any  one. 
Or  else  I  copied  the  corner  of  the  breakfast 
table  as  it  happened  to  be.  You  will  see  that 
that  is  a  reasonable  method  of  meeting  any 
difficulties  that  come  up  in  strict  painting. 

« I  got  quite  sure  that  my  many  years'  ac- 
quaintance with  the  works  of  art  which  were 
arrangements  would  be  sufficient  to  remain  in 
my  mind  while  I  worked  in  so  different  a  way 
for  purposes  of  education.  In  the  studio  with 


C  "7  3 

Hunt  we  (for  there  were  three  or  four  of  us), 
painted  from  the  model  in  his  way,  which  was 
a  variation  of  Couture's ;  perhaps  not  exactly 
his  way  but  with  his  mixtures  of  paints  and 
his  kind  of  brush.' ' 

La  Farge  loved  to  dwell  upon  that  period 
of  exciting  experiment  and  treasured  all  its 
souvenirs,  especially  those  connected  with  his 
fellow  students.  Amongst  these  was  the  late 
William  James,  who  drew  "beautifully"  he 
said,  repeating  the  word  three  or  four  times. 
He  knew  Henry  James  also,  then  and  there- 
after. The  novelist  had,  he  said,  the  painter's 
eye,  adding  that  few  writers  possessed  it.  In 
La  Farge's  opinion  the  literary  man  did  not  so 
much  see  a  thing  as  think  about  it.  In  those  old 
days  he  advised  Henry  James  to  turn  writer, 
but,  he  said,  he  did  not  offer  his  counsel  dog- 
matically. He  simply  felt  vaguely  that  in  the 
conflict  between  the  two  instincts  in  his  friend 
the  writing  one  seemed  the  stronger.  He  was 
always  pleased  to  remember,  by  the  way,  that 
when  Stanford  White  had  come  to  him  with 
the  ambition  to  be  a  painter  he  had  urged  him, 
instead,  to  embrace  architecture  as  his  pro- 
fession. Some  of  the  gifts  of  the  painter  were 
there,  he  told  me,  but  on  the  whole  he  felt  that 


C  118  D 

White's  bent  for  building  and  decoration  was 
decisive  and  it  interested  him  to  observe  the 
confirmation  of  his  judgment  in  the  architect's 
career.  His  friendship  with  William  James  had 
the  special  warmth  springing  from  youthful 
struggles  together  and  he  delighted  to  talk  of 
a  meeting  that  they  had  late  in  life,  the  first  in 
something  like  twenty-one  years.  They  dined 
together  and  some  time  afterwards  La  Farge, 
who  had  spoken  to  me  of  the  episode  before, 
wrote  to  me  about  it  more  in  detail  in  this 
letter:  — 

"  He  reminded  me  as  we  dined  of  our  going 
out  sketching  together  at  the  Glen,  Newport, 
and  of  what  I  was  painting  then,  and  that  I 
was  not  copying.  On  the  contrary,  I  was 
merely  using  the  facts  to  support  my  being  in 
relation  to  nature.  It  is  Rousseau  who  said,  for 
painting  out  of  doors  in  study,  <  You  can  paint 
a  chestnut  well  from  an  oak  if  you  are  in  the 
mood  to  feel  nature  call  on  you.'  Well,  this 
had  intrigued  James  all  these  years  (fifty) 
and  also  my  manner  of  painting.  The  ground 
of  my  panel  was  absolutely  black.  I  should 
think  so.  It  was  a  beautifully 6 varnished'  Jap- 
anese black  panel1  of  which  I  had  taken  off 

1  As  a  matter  of  fact,  an  old  tea  tray,  he  told  me. 


C  "9  D 

the  top  shining  coats  to  get  at  the  dull  'pre- 
paration '  underneath,  on  which  as  you  know 
the  work  is  based.  It  could  not  be  blacker  and 
safer.  It  will  last  a  thousand  years  and  stand 
being  in  the  sea,  etc.  And  my  picture,  of 
course,  has  not  altered.  It  is  in  the  Boston 
Museum.  And  across  all  those  years  W.  J. 
remembered  it.  I  explained  to  his  satisfac- 
tion. Then  he  said :  *  Do  you  remember  the 
bread  and  butter,  and  there  was  a  red-headed 
girl  served  us/  6  W.,'  I  said,  'many  a  red- 
headed girl  I  have  met  (and  white  horse)  but 
111  take  this  one  for  granted.'  'Well/  he 
concluded,  *  John,  who  could  have  guessed 
then  that  to-day  we  should  be  sitting  here, 
each  one  an  authority  in  his  own  profession ! ' 
Is  that  James-y  or  not?  And  is  n't  it  pretty? 
A  few  days  after,  at  Easter,  in  Columbia 
Chapel,  the  clergyman  preaching  referred  to 
James,  not  the  Christian  apostle,  but  our 
friend,  and  the  views  we  associate  with  him." 

With  Newport  he  had,  for  most  of  his  life, 
close  relations,  keeping  a  home  there  and  pre- 
serving the  local  friendships  dating  from  his 
studies  with  Hunt,  but  when  the  latter  were 
broken  off'  the  scenes  and  events  of  his  life 
rapidly  changed.  Early  in  i860  he  returned 


C  120  3 

to  New  York  and  for  the  moment  abandoned 
painting,  and  in  the  early  spring  he  went 
South  to  Louisiana.  There  the  artistic  faculty 
reasserted  itself.  "I  drew  and  painted,"  he 
says,  "because  it  was  so  tempting,  always 
drawing  or  painting  in  the  way  of  study  of 
some  special  side  of  the  things  we  see,  and 
keeping  secret  to  myself  some  of  the  draw- 
ings, which  you  may  have  seen,  and  which 
were  made  to  illustrate  Browning's  poems. " 
When  he  came  North  in  May  he  was  de- 
layed in  all  his  projects  "and  generally  made 
doubtful  of  the  future  by  having  brought 
back  from  the  marshes  of  Louisiana  a  bad 
case  of  malaria  which  for  many  years  hung 
over  me."  He  resumed  his  painting,  starting 
an  important  picture  of  St.  Paul  preaching, 
for  the  church  or  chapel  of  his  friend  Father 
Hecker,  the  founder  of  the  Paulist  order,  but 
the  work  went  slowly.  In  i860  he  was  mar- 
ried, to  Miss  Margaret  Mason  Perry.  Then 
came  the  war,  but,  as  I  have  previously  men- 
tioned, La  Farge's  eyes  were  not  fitted  for  the 
battlefield  and  the  effect  at  this  time,  despite 
poignant  distractions,  was  simply  to  confirm 
him  in  the  enthusiastic  practice  of  the  profes- 
sion into  which  he  had  drifted.  I  make  much 


of  the  influences  that  moulded  him  and  ac- 
cordingly I  speak  here  of  his  meeting  with 
John  Bancroft,  a  friend  who  gave  him  still  an- 
other key  to  the  mysterious  land  of  art.  He 
thus  recognizes  the  gift :  — 

"  The  war  upset  all  my  notions  of  the  fu- 
ture I  had  sketched  out,  that  is  to  say  of  going 
to  Europe  and  making  further  studies  there 
and  becoming  definitely  a  painter,  or  at  any 
rate  devoting  myself  to  an  artistic  career. 
For  every  reason  I  remained  here,  deeply  in- 
terested in  the  war  and  regretting  having  no 
chance  to  take  any  part  in  it.  It  was  thus  that 
I  came  to  know  John  Bancroft,  who  had  been 
down  to  try,  but  who  found  that  he  was  not 
fitted  for  anything  like  that,  though  his  health 
was  as  good  as  mine  was  bad,  still  broken  by 
the  continuance  of  the  illness  acquired  in  the 
South. 

"This  acquaintance  with  Bancroft  and  a 
continued  friendship  was  a  serious  factor  in 
my  life.  He  was  a  student,  almost  too  much 
of  one,  and  we  plunged  into  the  great  ques- 
tions of  light  and  color  which  were  beginning 
to  be  laid  out  by  the  scientific  men  and  which 
later  the  painters  were  to  take  up.  This  was 
the  cause  of  a  great  deal  of  work  but  of  less 


C  122  3 

painting,  if  I  may  say  so,  less  picture-making, 
because  of  an  almost  incessant  set  of  observa- 
tions and  comments  and  inquiries  supple- 
mented by  actual  work  in  painting.  All  that  I 
have  done  since  then  has  been  modified  by 
those  few  years  of  optical  studies,  and  the  last 
realistic  painting  which  may  have  shown  it  is 
the  «  Paradise  Valley,'  which  belongs  to  '66- 
'67-68. 

<<  Bancroft  and  myself  we^e  very  much  in- 
terested in  Japanese  color  prints  and  I  im- 
ported a  great  many  in  the  early  sixties  for  us 
both,  through  A.  A.  Low.  I  think  it  was  1 863. 
We  had  to  risk  our  purchases  entirely  and  got 
few  things  as  we  should  have  chosen  them,  as 
we  had  at  that  time  no  persons  interested  in 
such  things.  We  had  nobody  over  there  in 
Japan  to  buy  for  us  with  any  discretion.  The 
point  that  interested  us  both  has  not  yet,  I 
think,  been  studied  out.  I  may  be  wrong,  but 
I  have  never  heard  it  discussed  among  the 
people  who  have  been  influenced  by  Japanese 
printing  or  by  the  amateurs  of  those  things. 
The  very  serious  point  to  me  was  the  display 
in  certain  of  these  color  prints  of  landscape 
relations  in  color.  This  is  done  so  simply  as 
to  give  a  continuous  explanation  of  how  the 


C  123  ] 

painter  built  his  scheme,  and  for  Bancroft 
and  myself,  interested  in  constructing  simi- 
lar schemes,  according  to  modern  scientific 
analyses,  this  Japanese  confirmation  and  occa- 
sional teaching  was  full  of  most  serious  inter- 
est. Whether  Mr.  Whistler,  for  instance,  ever 
saw  this  I  do  not  know.  Of  course  he  and 
others  were  much  interested  in  the  beautiful 
arrangements  of  light  or  dark,  light  and  color, 
and  so  on,  and  Mr.  Whistler  appreciated  this 
and  amused  himself  by  making  more  of  it  than 
really  was  necessary  to  a  man  of  his  capacity. 

"  For  a  person  of  your  intelligence  and  cul- 
ture knows  quite  well  that  the  Japanese  thing 
in  those  matters  is  not  new,  that  the  merit  of 
these  things  in  the  way  of  color,  line,  and  space 
and  the  arrangement  of  the  three  is  exactly 
what  it  has  always  been  in  the  best  work  of 
every  nation  and  every  clime,  as  far  as  we 
know.  But  in  the  Japanese  prints  and  in  some 
of  their  paintings  it  is  more  obvious  because  it 
is  less  covered  up.  It  is  like  a  child's  book  in 
words  of  three  syllables.  It  was  so  that  any  one 
who  ran  could  read  and  at  length  people  be- 
gan to  catch  on.  But  you  know  this  and  know 
how  foolish  and  childish  is  the  talk  of  to-day 
with  regard  to  any  novelty  in  the  principles  of 


these  now  admired  bits  of  art,  which  at  my 
date  endangered  with  amateurs  the  reputation 
of  the  painter  who  publicly  admired  them. 

"Let  us  reverse  this  question  and  take  an 
anecdote  of  Okakura.  On  one  of  his  first  days 
here  I  took  him  to  see  some  wonderful  Rem- 
brandts.  Okakura  knelt  before  them  and  said, 
'This  is  what  the  great  Chinese  artists  in  black 
and  white  meant  to  do.'  Then  he  recognized 
carefully  and  analyzed  the  same  points  that 
we  are  speaking  of,  taking  one  day  to  study 
the  arrangement  of  line  and  space ;  the  next 
day  for  the  study  of  the  arrangement  of  black 
and  white,  and  the  next  day  again  for  the  pic- 
ture part,  that  told  the  story,  the  wonderful 
meaning  and  the  extraordinary  skill  in  draw- 
ing which  allowed  those  incredible  subtle 
meanings  to  be  represented  by  a  line  of  the 
etcher.  As  you  see,  he  was  faithful  to  the 
fundamental  laws,  those  by  which  I  hold,  and 
he  saw  first  the  basis  of  the  Rembrandt,  which 
it  has  in  common  with  all  great  work,  and  then 
the  special  beauties  of  Rembrandt  himself.'' 

Europe  had  helped  La  Farge  and  he  had 
stretched  out  an  acquisitive  hand  to  the  East. 
Literature  and  art,  archaeology  and  science, 
had  all  contributed  to  bring  his  genius  to  the 


C  125  ] 

point  of  efflorescence.  Arduously,  and  yet  with 
a  disinterestedness  that  makes  him  seem  more 
a  type  of  natural  and  happy  growth  than  of 
straining  effort,  he  had  arrived  at  the  making 
of  beautiful  pictures. 


V 


HALF  A  CENTURY  OF 
PAINTING 

THE  title  of  this  chapter  points  to  the 
unity  in  the  life  of  a  great  artist  which 
his  biographer  always  comes  so  soon  to  recog- 
nize. In  the  years  of  preparation  external  in- 
cidents stand  out  in  sharp  relief  and  there  is 
some  difficulty  in  so  coordinating  them  as  to 
show  their  formative  influences.  Then,  with 
the  maturing  of  a  man's  gifts  and  their  final 
consecration  to  a  single  purpose,  the  miscel- 
laneous events  of  his  career,  if  I  may  so  de- 
fine them,  fall  into  a  more  or  less  subordi- 
nate relation.  Where  he  was  once  dominated 
he  now  dominates.  Experience  may  have  its 
initiatory  significance,  but  on  the  whole  it 
counts  more  as  supplying  the  raw  material 
for  creative  processes.  The  La  Farge  of  Paul 
de  Saint- Victor's  Paris  and  of  wide  European 
wanderings,  the  La  Farge  of  the  Manchester 
Exposition  and  pre-Raphaelite  contacts,  is  a 
temperament  feeling  its  way.  The  La  Farge 
of  the  half-century  with  which  I  have  now  to 
deal  is  simply  a  genius  in  action. 


The  Ascension 


I  12v  3 

All  that  happens  to  him  in  this  period  is  of 
interest  more  particularly  as  it  finds  expres- 
sion in  his  work.  His  cup  of  sensation  was  well 
filled.  In  the  early  seventies  he  went  again  to 
Europe,  which,  indeed,  he  was  not  infrequently 
to  revisit.  Later  he  made  two  memorable  jour- 
neys, to  Japan  and  to  the  South  Seas.  At  home 
he  played  a  constructive  part  in  the  building 
up  of  an  American  school  of  art,  constantly 
figuring  in  the  world  of  exhibitions  and  gen- 
eral organization,  training  assistants  and  trans- 
mitting his  knowledge  not  only  directly  to 
pupils  but  through  lectures  and  writings.  His 
work  in  glass  and  mural  decoration  had  also 
the  effect  of  immensely  increasing  the  number 
of  those  episodes  which  diversify  the  purely 
human  side  of  an  artist's  life.  On  more  than 
one  of  those  episodes  we  shall  have  occasion  to 
pause.  But  it  is  LaFarge  the  artist,  specifi- 
cally, who  now  engages  our  study,  and,  above 
all,  La  Farge  the  painter. 

He  first  assumed  that  character  with  abso- 
lute authority  in  the  "  Paradise  Valley,"  that 
Newport  landscape  dating  from  the  sixties 
with  which  his  recollections  have  already 
given  us  some  little  acquaintance.  It  is  a  pic- 
ture of  peculiar  significance  in  the  history  of 


[  «8  ] 

American  art,  especially  for  any  one  of  the 
present  generation.  When  I  first  saw  it,  a 
long  time  ago,  I  found  no  difficulty  in  appre- 
hending its  beauty.  There  was  nothing  in  the 
least  esoteric  about  it.  And  yet  I  was  a  little 
puzzled.  Impressionism,  I  knew,  had  come 
into  American  painting  long  after  its  date, 
and,  besides,  La  Farge  was  not  painting,  at 
the  moment,  anything  quite  like  it,  nor  had 
he  done  so  for  years.  Yet  here  was  a  land- 
scape, done  in  America  while  the  Hudson 
River  school  was  still  active  in  the  land,  and 
preserving  qualities  of  light  and  atmosphere 
to  which  that  school  had  never  even  begun  to 
attain.  Also  it  was  as  emphatically  modern  as 
anything  painted  in  the  last  quarter  of  a  cen- 
tury. Indeed,  this  picture,  like  the  master- 
pieces of  Corot  and  Rousseau  —  to  which,  by 
the  way,  it  owns  no  kinship  implying  the  debt 
of  the  imitator — has  that  effect  as  of  truth  and 
artistic  Tightness  which  is  of  no  date.  For  the 
critic,  instinctively  eager  to  account  for  so  be- 
wildering a  boon,  the  work  naturally  had  an 
extraordinary  interest,  and  in  talk  with  La 
Farge  the  subject  was  one  to  which  we  were 
always  returning. 

He  himself  had  a  lively  appreciation  of  its 


C  ] 

historical  meaning  and  liked  to  go  over  the 
origins  of  his  success  in  landscape.  It  was  a 
hard-won  success  and  involved,  among  other 
things,  a  lavish  expenditure  of  patience.  He 
built  himself  a  little  hut  among  the  rocks, 
where  he  would  leave  his  picture,  going  back 
day  after  day  so  as  to  get  as  far  as  possible 
the  same  light.  Fishermen  broke  into  the  hut 
once,  to  injure  the  canvas,  and  he  had  trouble 
with  gypsies,  whose  prying  ways  threatened 
disaster  to  his  handiwork,  but  nothing  daunted 
him.  He  was  urged  on,  too,  by  the  over- 
powering impulse  of  the  discoverer,  the  con- 
viction that  if  he  could  do  what  he  had  in  his 
mind  he  would  push  back  the  boundaries  of 
landscape  art.  In  the  "Paradise  Valley,,,  he 
told  me, "  I  undertook  a  combination  of  a  large 
variety  of  problems  which  were  not  in  the  line 
of  my  fellow  artists  here,  nor  did  I  know  of 
any  one  in  Europe  who  at  that  time  undertook 
them."  He  then  elaborated  the  description  of 
his  procedure :  — 

"My  programme  was  to  paint  from  nature 
a  portrait,  and  yet  to  make  distinctly  a  work 
of  art  which  should  remain  as  a  type  of  the 
sort  of  subject  I  undertook,  a  subject  both 
novel  and  absolutely  'everydayish.'  I  there- 


C  ] 

fore  had  to  choose  a  special  moment  of  the  day 
and  a  special  kind  of  weather  at  a  special  time 
of  the  year,  when  I  could  count  upon  the 
same  effect  being  repeated.  I  chose  a  number 
of  difficulties  in  combination  so  as  to  test  my 
acquaintance  with  them  both  in  theory  of 
color  and  light  and  in  the  practice  of  painting 
itself.  I  chose  a  time  of  day  when  the  shadows 
falling  away  from  me  would  not  help  me  to 
model  or  draw,  or  make  ready  arrangements 
for  me,  as  in  the  concoction  of  pictures  usu- 
ally ;  and  I  also  took  a  fairly  covered  day, 
which  would  still  increase  the  absence  of 
shadows.  That  would  be  thoroughly  com- 
monplace, as  we  see  it  all  the  time,  and  yet 
we  know  it  to  be  beautiful,  like  most  of  '  out- 
of-doors.'  I  modelled  these  surfaces  of  plain 
and  sky  upon  certain  theories  of  the  opposi- 
tion of  horizontals  and  perpendiculars  in 
respect  to  color  and  I  carried  this  general 
programme  into  as  many  small  points  of  de- 
tail as  possible.  I  also  took  as  a  problem  the 
question  of  the  actual  size  of  my  painting  as 
covering  the  surface  which  I  really  saw  at  a 
distance,  which  would  be  represented  by  the 
first  appearance  of  the  picture.  A  student  of 
optics  will  understand. 


C  3 

"The  main  difficulty  was  to  do  all  this 
from  nature  and  to  keep  steadily  at  the  same 
time  to  these  theories  without  having  them 
stick  out,  if  I  may  say  so,  as  some  of  my  in- 
telligent foreign  friends  managed  to  do.  In 
nature  nothing  sticks  out.  My  foreign  friends 
also  have  since  worked  out  similar  problems 
but  they  have  not  always  insisted  upon  that 
main  one,  that  the  problems  are  not  visible  in 
nature.  Nature,  meaning  in  this  case  the  land- 
scape we  look  at,  looks  as  if  it  had  done  itself 
and  had  not  been  done  by  an  artist." 

That  last  remark  is  very  characteristic  of 
La  Farge's  aversion  from  the  mere  display  of 
learning,  the  deliberate  exaltation  of  person- 
alized technique.  Competent  execution,  as  I 
have  remarked  before,  he  took  for  granted  as 
the  proper  attribute  of  any  self-respecting 
painter.  There  is  a  delightful  instance  of  this 
in  a  letter  of  his  to  Miss  Barnes,  embodying 
much  the  same  analysis  of  the  same  picture 
as  that  given  in  the  foregoing  quotation. 
"  This,  of  course,"  he  concludes,  "has  nothing 
to  do  with  the  actual  technique  employed  in 
the  painting,  about  which  any  artist  of  know- 
ledge can  judge."  It  was  just  about  that  time, 
in  1869,  that  he  was  made  a  member  of  the 


Academy  of  Design.  However  he  may  have 
struck  his  new  colleagues  we  may  be  certain 
of  one  thing,  that  he  gave  them  furiously  to 
think.  I  can  cite  no  contemporary  criticism  of 
the  "Paradise  Valley  "  in  particular,  but  there 
is  one  available  passage  on  his  work  in  that 
period  from  the  pen  of  a  coeval  and  friend.  It 
occurs  in  "The  Digressions  of  V,"  the  charm- 
ing autobiography  in  which  Elihu  Vedder  has 
only  lately  told  us  of  his  early  impressions  of 
art  and  artists.  Speaking  of  his  experiences 
in  Boston  just  after  the  war  he  says :  — 

"  I  always  connect  La  Farge  with  the  Bos- 
ton of  that  time.  If  Hunt  was  comforting,  La 
Farge  was  inspiring;  I  have  never  met  any 
one  more  so,  and  it  was  only  my  impervious- 
ness  that  prevented  my  profiting  more  by  his 
advice  and  example.  It  was  at  this  time  he 
painted  those  flowers  —  one  might  say  truth- 
fully his  flowers ;  I  had  never  seen  anything 
like  them  then,  and  I  have  never  seen  any- 
thing like  them  since.  At  this  time  I  remem- 
ber Doll  having  for  sale  that  wonderful  little 
picture  of  La  Farge's,  —  the  old  Newport 
house  with  its  large  roof  covered  with  snow, 
standing  solemnly  in  the  gloom  of  an  over- 
cast winter  day,  —  not  only  wonderful  in 


C  133  ] 

sentiment,  but  for  the  truth  of  the  transmitted 
light  through  the  snow-burdened  air.  I  went 
to  Doll's  one  day  with  the  firm  intention  of 
becoming  the  happy  possessor  of  this  little 
picture,  but  La  Farge  by  some  subtle  instinct 
must  have  scented  danger,  and  I  found  it  was 
no  longer  for  sale.  This  quality  of  subtlety  is 
shown  in  those  never-to-be-forgotten  flowers, 
particularly  in  that  damp  mass  of  violets  in  a 
shallow  dish  on  a  window-sill,  where  the  out- 
side air  faintly  stirring  the  lace  curtains  seems 
to  waft  the  odour  towards  you.  This  quality, 
peculiarly  his  own,  affects  me  in  his  writings, 
so  that  as  a  writer  I  was  at  one  time  inclined 
to  find  fault  with  him  for  a  certain  elaborate 
obscurity  in  his  style,  which  I  now  see  arises 
from  his  striving  to  express  shades  of  thought 
so  delicate  that  they  seem  to  render  words  al- 
most useless.  Therefore  his  words  seem  to 
hover  about  a  thought  as  butterflies  hover 
about  the  perfume  of  a  flower/ ' 

In  this  evocation  of  the  very  life  of  nature 
La  Farge  was  unapproachable  among  painters 
of  flowers,  save  by  the  French  Fantin-Latour 
and  the  American  Maria  Oakey  Dewing,  one 
of  his  own  pupils.  To  say  of  a  master  in  this 
field  that  he  interprets  the  soul  of  a  flower  is 


to  risk  a  certain  misunderstanding,  for  the 
phrase  may  so  readily  be  made  to  point  to 
imaginative  and  even  " literary' '  ideas  of 
which  the  painter  never  dreamed.  Yet  there 
is  no  other  phrase  so  delicately,  so  truthfully 
descriptive.  Anatole  France,  to  whom  I  find 
myself  so  often  returning  as  I  think  of  La 
Farge,  recalls  George  Sand's  reverie  over 
some  wild  sage  that  had  left  its  perfume  on 
her  hands,  and,  many  miles  away,  had  stirred 
her  to  affectionate  remembrance.  She  waxed 
poetic  on  the  theme.  We  have  all  shared  in 
her  experience.  We  are  all,  in  other  words, 
aware  of  something  more  than  sensuous 
beauty  in  a  flower,  something  that  seems 
really  among  the  things  of  the  spirit.  So  La 
Farge  painted  his  flowers,  with  an  indescriba- 
ble tenderness.  His  vision  pierced  deeper  than 
that  of  the  artist  who  would  deal  in  forthright, 
domineering  fashion  with  "things  seen."  He 
could  not  shake  off  the  glamour  of  things 
unseen  but  felt.  Like  that  veil  on  which  Flau- 
bert is  so  magnificent  there  was  always  a 
beauty  just  beyond  his  reach.  And  yet,  as  I 
cannot  too  often  emphasize,  there  went  hand  in 
hand  with  his  subtle,  spiritualized  conception 
of  art,  that  habit  of  the  scientific  inquirer  and 


C  135  3 

the  experimentalist  in  technique  which  allied 
him  to  the  great  realists  in  painting.  Here  is 
his  reply  to  inquiries  of  mine  about  his  early 
flower  paintings,  some  of  them  going  as  far 
back  as  1859  :  — 

"My  painting  of  flowers  was  in  great  part 
a  study ;  that  is,  a  means  of  teaching  myself 
many  of  the  difficulties  of  painting,  some  of 
which  are  contradictory,  as,  for  example,  the 
necessity  of  extreme  rapidity  of  workmanship 
and  very  high  finish.  Many  times  in  painting 
flowers  I  painted  right  on  without  stopping, 
painting  sometimes  far  into  the  night  or  to- 
wards morning  while  the  flower  still  retained 
the  same  shade,  which  it  was  sure  to  lose  soon. 
This  obliged  me  also  to  know  the  use  of  my 
colors  and  the  principles  of  the  use  of  the 
same,  for  the  difference  between  daylight  and 
lamplight  is  very  great,  and  the  colors  as  one 
sees  them  in  one  light  are  not  the  colors  of 
another.  That  we  all  know,  as  even  the  ladies 
do  who  wear  different  colors  for  night  from 
what  they  do  for  the  day. 

"Thinking  again  about  the  pictures  of 
flowers  which  I  used  to  paint,  there  were,  be- 
sides the  paintings  that  were  studies  of  the 
flowers,  and  those  that  were  painted  as  pic- 


tures,  certain  ones  in  which  I  tried  to  give 
something  more  than  a  study  or  a  handsome 
arrangement.  Some  few  were  paintings  of  the 
water  lily,  which  has,  as  you  know,  always 
appealed  to  the  sense  of  something  of  a  mean- 
ing—  a  mysterious  appeal  such  as  comes  to  us 
from  certain  arrangements  of  notes  of  music. 
Hence,  I  was  not  surprised  a  few  weeks  ago 
to  find  a  design  for  a  frame  of  one  of  these 
paintings  of  the  water  lily,  treated  as  'the* 
water  lily,  not  <a'  water  lily.  The  frame  had 
a  few  bars  of  one  of  Schumann's  songs,  which 
was  written  to  Heine's  verses,  — 

"Du,  scheme  weisse  Blume, 
Kanst  du  das  Lied  verstehn  ? 

"I  cannot  tell,  of  course,  whether  in  these 
two  or  three  attempts  I  have  done  something 
more  than  a  mere  handsome  representation, 
but  the  intention  I  had,  and  consequently  I 
painted  with  great  care,  so  carefully  that  the 
paintings  probably  looked  easily  done  because 
of  their  real  finish,  which  did  not  show  any  of 
what  Mr.  Whistler  calls  finish/' 

It  is  in  the  period  from  which  most  of  these 
flower  paintings  are  derived  that  we  come 
upon  one  of  the  delightful  interludes  in  La 


I  137  ] 

Farge's  artistic  development,  like  his  excur- 
sions into  the  crafts  and  into  sculpture,  which 
denote  his  inexhaustible  energy  and  the  pas- 
sion of  the  artist  to  be  forever  fashioning  some- 
thing with  his  hands.  When  Ticknor  and 
Fields  started  "The  Riverside  Magazine/'  a 
periodical  for  the  young,  and  the  editor,  the 
late  Horace  Scudder,  was  looking  for  good 
illustrations,  the  only  artist  who  gave  him 
solid  satisfaction,  he  wrote  to  William  Ros- 
setti,  was  La  Farge.  The  latter,  hampered  by 
ill-health,  nevertheless  continued  to  draw. 
For  an  edition  of  "Enoch  Arden,"  published 
by  the  same  firm,  he  did  some  of  his  work 
"bolstered  up  in  bed,"  the  blocks  going  to 
press  a  few  minutes  after  the  engraver  had 
pulled  his  proof.  In  the  "Rossetti  Papers," 
where  Scudder's  letter  is  printed,  the  English 
poet's  brother  gives  also  this  extract  from  his 
diary  for  April,  1868:  — 

"Showed  Gabriel  the  photographs  sent  me 
by  Scudder  after  designs  ( <  Piper  of  Hamelin/ 
etc. )  by  La  Farge;  he  was  much  pleased  with 
them,  and  took  them  off  to  show  to  Brown." 

They  pleased  La  Farge.  I  think  he  kept  a 
soft  spot  in  his  heart  for  these  waifs  and  strays 
of  his  young  manhood,  and  one  evidence  of 


C  138  ^ 

this  is  the  manner  in  which,  long  afterwards, 
he  would  occasionally  make  further  use  of 
their  motives.  The  design  of  a  seated  actor 
made  for  Browning's  "Men  and  Women  " 
ultimately  reappeared  in  the  memorial  win- 
dow to  Edwin  Booth,  and  when  he  was  paint- 
ing his  "  Socrates/'  for  the  Supreme  Court  at 
St.  Paul,  he  told  me  that  he  was  amusing  him- 
self by  reproducing  in  the  charioteer  and  his 
horses  one  of  his  early  drawings.  At  the  time 
when  these  were  made  his  plans  were  gen- 
erous in  scope.  For  Browning's  poems  he 
contemplated  producing  over  three  hundred 
drawings,  and  he  started  upon  an  edition  of  the 
Gospels  for  Mr.  Houghton.  He  and  Scudder 
were  in  very  warm  sympathy,  greatly  fostered 
by  the  admiration  they  shared  for  the  chaotic 
genius  of  William  Blake ;  and  the  two,  artist 
and  editor,  projected  a  wonderful  series  of  a 
hundred  or  more  illustrations  for  the  "River- 
side." La  Farge's  idea  was  to  develop  fanta- 
sies, "imaginary  representations  or  fairly  ac- 
curate representations  of  historic  incidents 
which  were  doubtful  or  of  such  a  poetic  nature 
as  to  pass  easily  into  fairyland."  He  thought, 
too,  of  taking  subjects  from  Greek  history  and 
Egyptian  tradition,  far-away  themes,  the  more 


C  !S9  ] 

remote  the  better,  and  his  imagination  rested 
fondly  on  the  idea  of  witches.  Comparatively 
few  of  these  illustrations  were  actually  en- 
graved, and  printed  at  the  time  —  two  or 
three  in  the  "Songs  from  Old  Dramatists" 
and  a  handful  in  Scudder's  magazine  —  but 
these  few  are  of  deep  interest.  Academic  crit- 
ics were  then  a  little  disposed  to  question  the 
thoroughness  of  La  Farge's  handling  of  the 
figure,  and  perhaps  they  were  right ;  but  if  he 
was  somewhat  deficient  in  matters  of  anatom- 
ical structure  there  was  nothing  in  his  work- 
manship to  diminish  the  force  of  his  inventive 
faculty.  His  "  Bishop  Hatto,"  his  «  Giant,"  his 
"  Fisherman  and  the  Afrite  "  are  wonderfully 
poetic  creations,  enveloped  in  the  true  spirit 
of  romance.  In  one  particular  instance  he 
bodied  forth  a  fantastic  idea  with  extraordi- 
nary power.  "The  Wolf  Charmer"  gives  a 
haunting  reality  to  a  figure  that  never  existed. 
How  deeply  it  interested  him  may  be  judged 
by  the  fact  that  he  took  up  the  subject  again, 
afterwards,  in  other  mediums,  ultimately  pro- 
ducing the  large  version  in  oils  now  in  the  pub- 
lic museum  at  St.  Louis. 

This  painting  is  an  impressive  manifestation 
of  La  Farge's  genius  for  the  illustration  of  po- 


[  i4o  n 

etic  feeling.  The  central  idea  is  not  precisely 
either  historical  or  dramatic.  This  page  out 
of  the  folk  lore  of  Brittany  tells  no  very  elabo- 
rate story.  The  piper  who  draws  the  wolves 
after  him  with  his  piping  may  be  the  hero  of 
any  number  of  eerie  narratives  recited  by  rus- 
tic firesides,  but  the  tales  told  about  him  have 
not  crystallized  in  a  single  fabric  of  romance 
universally  known.  His  charm  is  vague  and 
subtle.  It  consists,  when  all  is  said,  in  just  the 
incongruity  of  a  human  being  consorting  with 
wild  beasts  on  some  strange  understanding 
that  might  in  an  instant  be  broken,  with  dis- 
astrous results.  It  is  music  that  is  the  tenuous 
bond  between  this  uncouth  shepherd  and  his 
green-eyed,  slavering  flock.  Were  the  notes 
to  cease  but  for  a  moment  the  man  who  seems 
to  be  the  master  would  be  torn  by  the  brutes 
that  follow  his  wild  strain.  That,  at  all  events, 
is  one  of  the  thoughts  provoked  by  this  pic- 
ture ;  the  imagination  is  filled  with  a  sense  of 
crouching  terrors,  of  forest  mysteries,  of  ad- 
venture in  a  world  that  to  the  mortal  eye  is  a 
sealed  book.  La  Farge,  with  the  magic  of  his 
art,  makes  us  free  of  that  world. 

It  is  characteristic  of  him  that  he  does  this 
not  with  the  aid  of  grotesque  accessories  or 


C  ^  1 

with  the  ingenious  manipulation  of  light  and 
shade,  but  by  the  simple  process  of  giving 
the  piper  and  his  wolves  intense  reality.  The 
weird,  huddled  procession  comes  toward  us 
through  a  passage  between  giant  rocks,  and 
beyond  these  we  see  the  forest,  a  place  of 
vast  tree  trunks  and  illimitable  distances.  The 
murmuring  silence  of  the  wildwood  is  there, 
and  in  it  we  feel  that  anything  is  possible,  even 
this  monstrous  companionship  of  man  and 
beast.  There  is  a  great  deal  contributing  to 
the  effect  of  the  picture  in  the  details  of  move- 
ment and  gesture.  The  piper  bent  over  his 
task  and  slowly  advancing,  the  wolves  pad- 
ding around  and  after  him,  bring  many  unob- 
trusive but  weighty  touches  of  expression  into 
the  scheme.  But  it  is  as  a  unit  of  imaginative 
design  that  "The  Wolf  Charmer''  bewilders 
and  enchants.  It  produces  an  illusion  as  of 
something  seen  in  a  dream,  poignantly  real- 
ized while  the  dream  lasts,  and  yet  appre- 
hended, as  things  are  so  often  apprehended  in 
a  dream,  with  an  indefinable  consciousness  of 
supernatural  implications.  It  is  as  though  the 
living  world  and  the  world  of  faery  were  made 
one  in  a  kind  of  vision. 

When  the  painting  was  exhibited  it  met 


[  142  ] 

with  some  criticism,  again  with  reference  to 
details  of  structure  in  the  forms,  and  La  Farge 
had  some  things  to  tell  me  on  that  point.  He 
said  that  people  might  argue  that  the  animals 
were  not  truthfully  drawn,  but  there  was  a 
reason  for  the  lines  he  had  adopted.  He  was 
not  trying  to  represent  nature  but  to  create 
the  atmosphere  of  the  little  German  poem 
that  had  first  put  the  idea  of  "The  Wolf 
Charmer"  into  his  head.  In  that  poem,  he 
said,  the  wolf  was  an  eerie  idea,  chiefly,  not 
literally  a  beast  of  fur  and  fangs.  So  when  he 
made  the  original  drawing,  years  ago,  the  one 
for  the  wood-cut,  he  made  many  studies  of 
jackals  and  hyenas  and  deliberately  mingled 
their  traits  with  those  of  the  true  wolf  in  his 
design.  He  told  me,  by  the  way,  that  his  old 
professor  in  anatomy,  Dr.  Rimmer,  depre- 
cated his  making  so  many  studies,  with  the 
remark,  "  When  you  make  so  many  studies 
you  discharge  your  memory/ '  La  Farge  ad- 
mitted that  there  was  a  good  deal  in  this  but 
somehow  the  study  idea  had  always  appealed 
to  his  sense  of  artistic  duty  and  he  had  filled 
countless  sketch  books  in  the  course  of  his  life. 
About "  The  Wolf  Charmer  "  he  told  me  an 
incident  that  had  given  him  immense  plea- 


sure.  When  he  went  to  Japan  he  met  there  a 
court  painter,  now  dead,  one  Hung  Ai.  "Oh, 
you  are  the  wolf  man,"  exclaimed  this  artist, 
instantly  remembering  him  as  the  maker  of 
the  design  which  he  knew  in  the  old  en- 
graving. He  also  surprised  La  Farge  by 
guessing  that  some  of  the  work  had  been  done 
with  a  Japanese  brush  —  he  said  he  recog- 
nized the  " stroke' '  —  which  happened  to  be 
the  fact.  Besides  the  original  drawing  and  the 
large  painting  La  Farge  did,  somewhere  be- 
tween the  two,  a  water  color  of  "  The  Wolf 
Charmer  "  for  the  late  William  C.  Whitney, 
for  whom  he  had  also  at  first  intended  the 
version  in  oils.  Whitney,  it  seems,  wanted  to 
be  his  backer.  La  Farge  told  him  that  it  made 
him  think  of  the  elephant  who  adopted  the 
family  of  a  heartless  hen,  and  to  take  care  of 
the  chickens  sat  on  them.  Still,  the  alliance  be- 
tween patron  and  painter  might  have  been 
effected,  but  just  then  Whitney  died. 

The  anecdote  carries  us  far  from  the  period 
of  the  flower  paintings  and  the  Newport  land- 
scapes, but  in  any  case  it  would  be  necessary 
to  note  here,  not  a  divergence  from  the  cen- 
tral principles  on  which  they  were  based  but 
indubitably  a  modification  of  La  Farge's  man- 


C  ^4  ] 

ner.  In  the  leisurely  experiments  of  the  fifties 
and  the  following  decade  he  had  achieved  ex- 
quisite beauty  of  surface.  If  he  had  gone  on 
exactly  as  he  had  begun,  and,  moreover,  had 
narrowly  pursued  that  special  quality,  we 
know  just  where  he  would  have  ranged  him- 
self. Save  for  the  poetic  and  religious  mo- 
tives which  were  bound  to  pass  into  his  work 
he  would  have  become  the  Alfred  Stevens  of 
this  country,  winning  fame  through  nothing 
more  nor  less  than  the  consummate  kneading 
of  pigment.  But,  as  I  trust  I  have  sufficiently 
indicated,  La  Farge,  while  appreciating  the 
value  of  such  fame  to  the  full,  was  so  consti- 
tuted intellectually  and  in  all  the  subtleties  of 
his  being  that  he  could  not  with  any  satisfac- 
tion have  sought  it  for  himself.  His  imagina- 
tion took  a  vastly  wider  sweep.  There  were 
too  many  other  fields  to  conquer.  Further- 
more, this  time  of  transition  was  to  witness  his 
first  excursion  into  mural  decoration  and  the 
growth  of  his  interest  in  glass.  There  is,  there- 
fore, something  like  a  movement  of  disloca- 
tion, gradual,  scarcely  perceptible,  but  unmis- 
takable none  the  less,  of  which  one  is  conscious 
on  taking  leave  of  the  early  paintings.  Differ- 
ent employments  have  their  quiet  influence 


C  145  ] 

upon  the  pictures  that  succeed  them,  an  influ- 
ence telling  simply  and  solely  in  this  matter  of 
surface.  It  is  still  beautiful,  but,  for  the  gour- 
met in  such  things,  less  beguiling  for  its  own 
sake.  The  magic  of  pure  painting  which  flour- 
ishes in  the  sixties  but  yields  in  the  seventies 
to  the  broader  and  necessarily  less  lacquer-like 
texture  imposed  by  the  exigencies  of  wall 
painting,  gives  place,  finally,  to  the  manner 
illustrated  by  the  Japanese  and  South  Sea 
souvenirs. 

It  is  not  a  question  of  values  but  of  dif- 
ferences, and,  indeed,  the  later  work,  if  it 
lacks  the  curious  bloom  of  the  first  paintings, 
has  other  rich  sources  of  charm  and  is  even, 
in  one  respect,  much  more  powerful.  La 
Farge's  two  famous  journeys  to  the  South 
and  East  gave  him  a  firmer  grasp  upon  light 
and  air  and  tremendously  enriched  his  'color. 
His  early  tones  have  an  incomparable  soft- 
ness and  delicacy,  but  I  remember  a  flower 
piece  of  his,  a  study  of  the  flaming  Hibiscus 
found  in  the  Society  Islands,  which  gave  one 
a  new  and  almost  startling  sense  of  what  he 
could  do  when  he  had  tasted  the  hot  inspiration 
of  the  tropics.  The  red  petals  fairly  blazed, 
but  —  and  the  point  interestingly  recalled  one 


C  146  ] 

to  the  continuity  of  La  Farge's  practice — the 
piercing  key  of  his  motive  was  kept  splendidly 
in  hand,  being  modulated  down  through  depths 
of  rich  green  foliage  into  peaceful  shadows. 
The  old  instinct  for  perfect  balance  remained, 
but  how,  under  such  overwhelming  skies, 
could  even  La  Farge  have  stopped  to  recap- 
ture the  fragile  tenderness  of  his  early  studies, 
supposing  for  a  moment  that  he  might  have 
thought  it  worth  while?  Light,  magnificent 
light,  intoxicated  him  and  drove  him  to  a 
swifter  and  bolder  notation  of  the  things  he 
saw.  His  first  impression  on  his  arrival  in  Ja- 
pan in  the  summer  of  1886  is  of  the  "splen- 
dour of  light,"  of  which  he  never  tires.  "It  is 
as  if  the  sky,  in  its  variations,  were  the  great 
subject  of  the  drama  we  are  looking  at,  or  at 
least  its  great  chorus.  The  beauty  of  the  light 
and  of  the  air  is  what  I  should  like  to  describe, 
but  it  is  almost  like  trying  to  account  for  one's 
own  mood  — like  describing  the  key  in  which 
one  plays."  Whether  he  is  working  in  oils  or 
in  water  colors  —  and  he  used  both  mediums 
on  his  travels  —  he  seizes  with  the  same  skill, 
the  same  feeling  for  its  diaphanous  quality,  the 
glory  of  light.  His  color,  thus  bathed  and 
interpenetrated,  grows  purer,  subtler,  some- 


[  147  ] 

times  more  clangorous  and  always  more  beau- 
tiful. We  miss  the  old  bloom  but  we  do  not 
regret  it. 

For  one  thing,  La  Farge  never  more  au- 
thoritatively put  technique  in  its  place  as  a 
means  to  an  end  than  in  his  Oriental  and  Pa- 
cific studies.  When  he  made  those  journeys 
we  may  be  sure  that  it  was  not  merely  to  feed 
the  lust  of  the  eye  but  to  come  to  close  quar- 
ters with  all  the  ways  of  foreign  and  notably 
mysterious  peoples,  barbaric  in  the  Fiji  Islands 
or  thereabouts,  and  in  the  East  possessing  a 
civilization  equally  different  from  anything  to 
which  he  was  accustomed.  For  many  a  "  travel 
note"  in  modern  art  a  photograph  might 
easily  be  substituted.  La  Farge  on  his  travels 
made  his  lightest  sketch  a  thing  of  enchanting 
originality.  As  through  some  curious  wave  of 
inner  illumination  you  are  made  aware  among 
his  pictures  not  simply  of  mountain  and  valley, 
of  sea  and  sky,  but  of  the  very  genius  of  a  far 
scene.  When  he  painted  "The  Hereditary  As- 
sassins of  King  Malietoa"he  made  manifest 
all  that  was  uncanny  about  those  personages. 
When,  in  Japan,  he  portrayed  «  The  Priest  of 
Idzumo  Watching  at  Dawn  for  the  Soul  of 
the  Dragon  Which  Comes  in  With  the  May 


C  148  ] 

Tides/'  you  shared  the  strange  vigil  of  the 
bizarre  figure  on  the  seashore.  And,  while  La 
Farge's  affair  with  his  picturesque  models,  who 
were  going  so  naturally  about  one  business  or 
other  incredible  to  any  Western  mind  save  a 
mind  like  his,  was  thus  profoundly  an  affair  of 
interpretation,  he  never  forgot  that  the  mere 
facts  observed  were  but  substances  and  alloys 
to  be  thrown  into  the  furnace  of  his  art  and 
there  fused  into  a  unit  of  design.  I  turn  to 
one  more  of  his  South  Sea  impressions,  typical 
of  his  constructive  habit.  It  is  a  picture  of  a 
ford  on  the  Tautira  River,  the  record  of  an 
incident  of  no  particular  importance.  Three 
women  are  crossing  the  ford.  One  of  them 
stands  in  the  shallows  on  the  farther  side, 
a  dimly  outlined  figure.  The  second  is  just 
striking  out,  and  shows  only  her  head  and 
shoulders  above  the  water.  The  third  comes 
running  down  the  bank,  apparently  to  take 
the  plunge  a  moment  later.  The  action  repre- 
sented is  artlessness  itself.  But  La  Farge  gets 
an  indescribable  and  very  beautiful  sequence 
of  movement  out  of  his  three  figures.  He  paints 
their  graceful  forms  against  a  luxuriant  back- 
ground, above  which  rise  purple  peaks,  and 
he  draws  all  of  the  wild  beauty  of  the  scene 


[  149  ] 

into  a  pictorial  harmony  so  simple,  and,  withal, 
having  such  an  air  of  finality  about  it,  that  the 
thing  seems  invented  until  you  realize  its  su- 
perb truth.  In  his  analysis  of  Delacroix  in 
"The  Higher  Life  in  Art "  he  has  a  pas- 
sage which  is  apposite  to  our  present  subject. 
Speaking  of  the  great  problem  of  movement 
in  art  he  says  :  — 

"As  with  Rodin,  who  is  a  great  example,  as 
with  Barye,  Delacroix's  friend,  as  with  the 
Greeks,  as  with  the  greater  men  of  all  time, 
except  the  present,  so  Delacroix  felt  the  un- 
expressed rule  that  the  human  being  never 
moves  free  in  space,  but  always,  being  an  ani- 
mal, in  relation  to  the  place  where  he  is,  to  the 
people  around  him,  to  innumerable  influences 
of  light,  and  air,  wind,  footing,  and  the  possi- 
bility of  touching  others.  This  is  the  absolute 
contradiction  of  the  studio  painting,  however 
dignified,  where  the  figure  is  free  from  any 
interruption,  and  nobody  will  run  against  it." 

The  principle  was  as  the  breath  of  life  to 
his  own  work.  His  use  of  it  accounts  for  the 
amazing  vitality  and  naturalness  of  his  nume- 
rous studies  of  South  Sea  dancers  and  it  is  im- 
plicit also  in  his  pictures  of  figures  nominally 
immobile.  One  such  is  a  certain  painting  of 


chiefs  in  war  dress,  another  Fijian  note.  The 
seated  soldiers  in  this  composition  are,  if  you 
like,  doing  nothing  at  all.  They  are  merely 
posed  in  a  double  row  —  if,  again,  you  so 
choose  to  consider  them  —  in  order  that  the 
artist  might  make  his  sketch.  But  he  makes 
more  than  a  sketch.  His  sitters  are  types  and 
in  their  lovely  landscape  the  suggestion  they 
convey  is  as  of  a  page  from  Fijian  life.  There 
is  something  dark  and  sinister  about  the 
group.  There  is  nothing  of  the  company  of 
docile  models,  posing  as  so  many  types  of 
form  and  color.  There  is  everything  of  a 
curious  state  of  savagery,  of  men  in  whose 
traits  and  demeanor  you  recognize  the  marks 
of  a  peculiar  social  state.  So  it  is  with  all  of 
La  Farge's  exotic  studies,  exotic  for  us  but 
not  for  him,  for  it  always  has  seemed  to  me 
that  he  was  completely  and  restfully  at  home 
in  the  lands  of  the  lotus-eater,  amongst  long- 
robed,  suave  Japanese  priests  or  amongst  the 
stalwart  chiefs  and  laughing  maidens  of  the 
Pacific.  It  is  with  a  wrench  that  we  retrace 
our  steps  to  follow  him  upon  the  busy  path 
of  the  mural  painter,  collaborating  with  archi- 
tects, facing  conditions  of  the  most  prac- 
tical nature,  and  adapting  his  wayward,  ad- 


Moses  receiving  the  Law  on  Mount  Sinai 


C  151  ] 

venturous  genius  to  the  discipline  of  per- 
haps the  most  exacting  of  all  the  arts  of  de- 
sign. 

As  usual  with  him  the  new  opportunity 
was  not  deliberately  sought  but  arose  in  slow, 
inevitable  fashion  out  of  his  personal  associa- 
tions and  out  of  the  intellectual  processes 
which  were  always  extending  his  horizon.  I 
lay  stress  upon  the  point,  for  one  of  the  most  in- 
teresting and  revealing  things  about  La  Farge 
is  his  freedom  from  anything  like  malice 
aforethought,  from  preconceived  resolution, 
in  his  different  undertakings.  He  was  a  man 
of  inspiration,  not  necessarily  sudden  leaps 
into  new  spheres,  but  ventures  implying  the 
guidance  of  that  " familiar' '  so  often  en- 
countered in  the  history  of  genius.  He  goes 
whole-heartedly  along  through  one  channel 
of  endeavor  and  then,  when  the  appointed 
time  comes,  he  invades  another.  I  say  "in- 
vades," for  at  these  moments  you  feel  that  he 
has  had  all  along  just  the  right  preparation 
and  is  somehow  equipped  for  whatever  re- 
sponsibilities may  befall.  His  assumption  of 
those  of  the  mural  decorator  dates  from  the 
seventies,  not  many  years  after  his  second 
journey  abroad,  but  in  origin  it  is  traceable  to 


[  152  3 

an  earlier  date,  to  old  studies  and  to  old  friend- 
ships. It  is  to  the  latter  especially  that  he  re- 
fers in  the  recollections  that  bear  upon  his 
work  in  Trinity  Church  at  Boston,  the  scene 
of  his  first  dealings  with  large  wall  spaces. 
They  go  back  to  the  formation  of  his  intimacy 
with  the  architect  of  that  building:  — 

"  I  had  known  H.  H.  Richardson  for  some 
few  years,  meeting  him  first  in  George  Post's 
office.  George  introduced  him  as  a  clever  man 
who  would  make  his  mark.  He  was  then  de- 
signing something  of  his  own,  a  Gothic  church 
based  upon  a  rather  strict  view  of  Gothic  prin- 
ciples. He  knew  almost  nothing  of  Gothic, 
being  fresh  from  6  Beaux  Arts '  of  the  worst 
possible  kind,  but  the  thing  was  striking  and 
as  I  came  out  I  said  to  Post,  'That  looks 
something  like  the  beginning  of  genius.'  Just 
before  his  death,  years  afterwards,  Richardson 
reproached  me  for  my  admiration  of  his  draw- 
ing, which  had  rankled,  apparently,  all  those 
years.  As  we  know,  he  became  a  type  of  Ro- 
manesque and  he  told  me  that  the  thing  had 
been  «  damned  bad,'  and  how  could  I  have  ad- 
mired it?  I  told  him  with  my  usual  frankness 
that  I  thought  so  too;  but  what  I  had  told  Post 
was  that  he  was  probably  a  genius,  which  has 


C  153  ] 

nothing  to  do  with  accuracy  of  design  in  a 
style  of  which  one  is  ignorant. 

"We  saw  a  good  deal  of  each  other,  as 
any  men  might  who  had  a  former  Parisian 
habit.  The  American  architects  had  not  yet 
begun  experience  of  the  Ecole  des  Beaux 
Arts,  but  Richardson  had  had  it  in  full,  and 
had  earned  his  living  in  the  offices  of  French 
architects,  so  that  he  knew  the  whole  machine. 
He  told  me  once,  in  contempt  for  the  past, 
that  if  he  had  enough  offices  he  could  build 
from  New  York  to  New  Orleans  without 
giving  himself  any  trouble  except  to  order 
the  designs.  And  he  had  been  a  militant, 
joining  the  young  men  who  hissed  away 
Viollet-le-Duc  from  his  lectures,  from  a  mix- 
ture of  anti-Gothic  and  anti-Napoleon  the 
Third  opinions.  But  the  meaning  of  all  these 
things  did  not  trouble  his  mind  once  the  sea 
was  crossed.  Then  he  took  up  the  grind  here, 
which  was  severe,  and  soon  was  fairly  suc- 
cessful. I  forget  how  the  first  work  went  on. 
Then  began  his  tendency  towards  the  Ro- 
manesque, but  nothing  serious,  so  that  when 
he  competed  in  the  most  courageous  way, 
with  Dick  Hunt,  among  others,  for  Trinity 
Church,  and  won,  he  had,  as  yet,  not  taken 


[  154  D 

hold  seriously  of  the  Romanesque  problem. 
He  designed  a  building  which  was  intelligent 
but  not  what  could  be  done  and  especially 
wanting  in  any  historical  character.  Gradually 
he  felt  it.  We  spent  many  hours  together. 
He  was  then  at  Staten  Island,  a  married  man, 
and  glad  to  give  me  long  day  and  night  hospi- 
tality. Like  many  other  great  men  he  was  a 
mighty  eater  and  drinker —  a  pitcher  of  milk, 
a  pitcher  of  champagne,  a  pitcher  of  water  — 
everything  was  done  on  a  large  scale  and  his 
work  is  of  that  kind.  He  used  to  speak  of 
<  Vechelle,'  which  he  did  not  understand,  unless 
perhaps  in  the  last  few  months  of  his  life, 
when  he  had  been  in  Spain.  I  was  able  to  pro- 
pose to  Richardson  to  change  entirely  the 
character  of  his  building,  so  far  at  least  as  ex- 
ternals, which  in  this  case  would  not  be  sepa- 
rated from  the  great  basis  of  plan,  etc.  I 
brought  him  photographs  of  the  Spanish  Ro- 
manesque churches,  Avila,  and  so  forth,  of 
which  I  had  a  special  collection,  made  for 
Queen  Victoria  during  her  visit.  Meanwhile, 
Richardson  built  the  Brattle  Street  church.' ' 

Regarding  this  church  La  Farge  had  a  pic- 
turesque association,  relating  to  the  relief  high 
up  on  the  tower  which  was  carried  out  by  Bar- 


C  155  ] 

tholdi.  The  French  sculptor  had  come  to  this 
country  just  after  Vannee  terrible,  to  work 
on  his  statue  of  Liberty  Enlightening  the 
World.  This  had  been  planned  before  the 
Franco-Prussian  war  by  a  committee  anxious 
to  make  some  political  demonstration  of 
French  Republicans  to  the  United  States, 
which  country  they  felt  to  be  in  some  dan- 
gerous relation  to  the  plans  of  Napoleon  III. 
He  produced  the  model  for  the  present  statue 
in  La  Farge's  studio  and  there  he  made  the  ac- 
quaintance of  Richardson.  "They  were  soon 
friends,"  writes  LaFarge,  "which  makes  all 
the  prettier  a  little  speech  of  Richardson's  to 
Bartholdi  when  Bartholdi,  naturally  interested 
in  Richardson's  long  stay  in  France,  inquired 
if  he  did  not  like  the  French,  and  Richard- 
son replied,  <No,  not  at  all/  One  of  the  best 
known  sculptors  in  the  country  had  been  asked 
to  carry  out  the  relief  for  the  Brattle  Street 
church,  and  he  had  declined  it,  because  in  his 
opinion  it  might  level  him  to  the  position  of  a 
stone-cutter  and  for  the  public  it  would  not 
look  well.  Hence  Bartholdi  was  asked  and  was 
only  too  glad  to  have  the  fun  of  preparing  the 
models  in  France,  to  be  carried  out  here  later. 
In  the  relief  as  it  was  put  up  were  several  por- 


C  ^6  ] 

traits,  including  those  of  Richardson  and  my- 
self.' '  But  we  must  return  to  Trinity  Church. 

In  the  early  seventies  LaFarge's  hold  upon 
landscape  had  not  seemed  to  be  slackening. 
The  "Paradise  Valley' '  had  won  him  honor. 
But  even  then,  he  said,  he  had  "become 
tempted  and  then  drawn  to  work  in  the  lines 
of  architecture,' '  and  presently  the  decisive 
step  was  taken :  — 

"It  was  thus  that  I  came  to  decorate  Trinity 
Church,  Boston,  which  was  being  built  by  my 
friend  Richardson,  who  believed  in  me  without 
having  much  proof  of  what  I  could  do  in  that 
way.  The  early  part  of  September,  1876,  was 
the  time  at  which  the  architect  gave  me  first 
notice  of  the  work  to  be  done  and  the  first  of 
January  was  to  be  the  final  end.  That  was  to 
include  the  entire  building,  from  the  first  talk  to 
the  finished  work.  The  building,  as  you  know, 
was  not  finished  then,  there  being  no  roof  on 
part  of  it,  nor  windows,  nor  possible  scaffold- 
ing, nor  designs  that  were  accurate.  There 
were  also  no  people.  I  managed  to  get  an  ex- 
tension of  several  weeks  so  that  February  saw 
the  work  through.  The  designs  that  were  to 
be  painted  in  the  day  had  often  to  be  made  on 
the  previous  night.  We  had  to  enlist  anyone. 


C  157  H 

.  .  .  The  amusing  point  to  me  was  the  appli- 
cation of  certain  Romanesque  originals  to  the 
spans  I  had  before  me  and  the  introduction  of 
a  great  deal  of  very  fine  and  calculated  detail 
into  passages  of  necessary  simplicity,  and  also 
the  doing  of  this  at  a  gallop.  I  think  that  in  one 
space,  fifteen  feet  square,  there  is  not  more 
than  three  or  four  days'  work,  and  everything 
was  done  in  that  way,  but  with  extreme  care, 
a  care  I  have  very  rarely  seen  repeated  in  any 
modern  work  by  anybody,  unless  perhaps  we 
take  some  of  the  work  of  Mr.  Sargent,  on 
which  he  has  spent  years  and  years  of  careful 
thought  and  elaboration.  Part  of  my  work,  you 
know,  is  hidden  by  the  facing  of  the  organ  at 
the  west  end,  so  that  that  elaboration  is  hid- 
den and  the  lines  of  my  general  composition 
are  more  or  less  destroyed.  So  of  course  all 
through  the  building  the  new  additions  are  not 
connected  with  the  old  lines. 

"I  must  tell  you  about  the  jamboree  in 
which  we  carried  out  the  work — the  windows 
open,  in  winter;  four  of  the  workmen  killed 
by  the  tiles  dropping  down  from  the  roof 
inside;  we  working  with  our  overcoats  and 
gloves,  unable  to  use  the  scaffoldings  very 
often  because  the  other  workmen,  masons, 


C  158  3 

carpenters,  tilers,  etc.  who  were  not  painters, 
had  them.  And  even  Phillips  Brooks,  thank 
God,  as  I  told  him,  came  near  being  killed  by 
a  plank  which  had  dropped  down  from  one 
hundred  feet  above  his  head.  I  thanked  the 
Lord  because  then  the  committee  put  in  an 
extra  man,  to  watch  the  hole  through  which 
the  planks  and  tiles  dropped  on  poor  devils 
and  future  bishops." 

The  absolute  novelty  of  the  undertaking 
had,  of  course,  much  to  do  with  these  unto- 
ward conditions.  American  mural  decoration 
was  then  in  the  process  of  being  born,  the  only 
contemporary  of  La  Farge's  making  any  seri- 
ous contribution  to  it  being  his  old  friend  Wil- 
liam Hunt,  who,  at  just  about  that  time,  was  to 
do  his  interesting  work  in  the  Capitol  at  Al- 
bany. There  were  clever  artists  to  be  got  hold 
of  as  assistants,  after  all,  but  they  had  to  be 
trained.  That  they  were  trained  by  him  and 
were  in  the  fullest  sense  assistants,  subject  to 
his  control,  was  a  matter  on  which  La  Farge 
liked  a  clear  understanding.  He  was  gener- 
osity itself  in  appreciation  of  what  these  men 
did  to  enable  him  to  execute  his  commission 
in  so  ridiculously  short  a  time;  he  remem- 
bered their  services,  as  he  valued  their  abili- 


C  J59  ] 

ties.  But  I  remember  his  indignation  when  on 
the  death  of  Francis  Lathrop  there  got  into 
print  a  "crazy  statement,' '  as  he  described  it 
to  me,  which  assigned  to  that  admirable  artist 
a  far  more  constructive  share  in  the  work  at 
Trinity  than  had  actually  been  his.  La  Farge 
straightway  sent  a  correction  to  the  journal  in 
error,  and,  writing  to  me  about  it  to  ask  that  I 
would  establish  the  record,  he  said,  "  It  is  a 
bore,  but  I  wish  the  fact  known  that  I  had  the 
charge  of  ten  to  fifteen  artists,  Frank  Millet, 
George  Maynard,  John  Du  Fais,  Francis 
Lathrop,  Sidney  L.  Smith,  George  L.  Rose, 
etc.  who  did  exactly  what  I  wanted  as  far  as 
they  knew  how." 

The  astonishing  thing  is  that  in  spite  of  the 
novelty  of  his  task,  the  physical  handicaps 
— including  ill-health  —  and  the  demon  of 
hurry  at  his  elbow,  La  Farge  nevertheless 
gave  fair  unity  to  his  large  scheme.  Strictly 
speaking,  however,  that  was  not,  at  that  mo- 
ment, the  all-important  point.  It  would  no 
doubt  have  been  better  if  he  could  have  had 
more  time  and  had  established  then  a  thor- 
oughly organic  conception  of  mural  painting. 
But  it  was  a  momentous  achievement  simply 
to  have  demonstrated  the  power  and  beauty 


C  160  3 

of  the  mere  idea  of  wall  painting.  La  Farge 
could  do  this  because  he  could  communicate 
to  his  designs  the  compelling  quality  of  style, 
and,  besides,  the  vitalizing  force  of  mind  and 
imagination.  There  are  merits  of  sheer  color 
in  the  Trinity  paintings,  as  there  are  merits 
of  the  shrewd  adjustment  of  painted  detail  to 
the  architectural  whole ;  but  most  significant 
of  all  in  their  historical  aspect  are  the  grand 
hieratic  figures  set  upon  the  walls,  solemn 
presences,  which  loom  like  living  prophets  in 
the  richly  Romanesque  interior,  and  the  beau- 
tiful angels,  who  have  an  even  more  formally 
decorative  purpose  but  possess  also  a  grace- 
ful, light  charm.  La  Farge  might  fall  short 
of  perfection  in  this  very  ambitious  attempt, 
thanks  to  no  fault  of  his  own,  but  it  was 
immediately  apparent  that  if  any  American 
painter  could  reach  that  goal  in  mural  deco- 
ration he  was  the  man. 

From  that  time  onward  to  the  day  of  his 
death  he  was  the  recognized  leader  in  work 
of  this  character,  and  important  commissions 
rapidly  succeeded  one  another.  I  have  no  in- 
tention of  traversing  them  all,  —  the  beauti- 
ful panels  in  the  Church  of  the  Incarnation 
in  New  York,  those  others  for  St.  Thomas's 


Church  in  the  same  city  which  were  not  long 
ago  destroyed  by  fire,  the  exquisite  decora- 
tions, "  Music  "  and  "  Drama,"  in  the  music 
room  of  the  New  York  house  of  the  Hon. 
Whitelaw  Reid,  and  many  other  noble  pro- 
ductions. The  list  is  far  too  long.  Further- 
more, all  of  this  work  was  quietly  carrying 
him  on  to  an  impressive  culmination,  the  crys- 
tallization of  his  decorative  genius  in  the 
monumental  forms  characteristic  of  the  great 
masters  in  all  ages.  La  Farge's  lyrical  vein 
was  ineradicable.  When  he  came  to  paint  the 
Reid  decorations,  in  the  eighties,  his  early 
sensitiveness  to  landscape  was  revived  in  full 
force  and  he  placed  amid  sylvan  surroundings 
figures  of  a  poetic  sentiment  and  grace  which 
would  suggest  Watteau,  if  it  were  not  that 
they  bear  the  stamp  of  La  Farge's  fuller, 
statelier,  and  more  realistic  sense  of  form. 
But  in  that  very  period  he  was  working  out 
one  of  his  profoundest  problems,  that  of 
««  The  Ascension  "  for  the  church  of  that  name 
in  New  York.  In  one  of  his  letters  he  tells 
me  how  he  arrived  at  the  solution  which  we 
know :  — 

"In  the  picture  of  'The  Ascension'  in  the 
Tenth  Street  church  there  were  some  very 


c 162 : 

curious  problems.  The  clergyman  had  liked 
a  drawing  which  I  had  made  many  years  be- 
fore, let  us  say  some  thirty  years  ago,  of  that 
subject,  with  a  similar  grouping.  This  was  to 
be  a  very  narrow  high  window  for  a  memo- 
rial chapel  out  West.  It  was  never  carried 
out;  in  fact  it  was  nothing  but  one  of  those 
projects  forced  upon  unfortunate  artists  by 
enthusiastic  millionaires  who  forget  almost 
immediately  what  their  last  plans  had  been. 
I  do  not  even  know  if  anything  was  done 
about  it,  but  the  proposed  patron  was  inter- 
esting, owing  to  his  having  very  many  works 
of  art,  some  of  which  were  fine  and  the  others 
not  usually  seen  in  this  country  even  to-day 
—  not  that  they  were  good. 

"Then  Dr.  Donald,  the  clergyman,  hap- 
pening to  see  this,  wished  to  have  this  long 
and  narrow  window  carried  out  where  you 
now  see  the  painting ;  there  being  a  recess  in 
the  wall,  it  might  be  used.  At  that  time  I  was 
very  anxious  to  have  Saint-Gaudens  get  a 
chance  to  do  work  and  to  show  his  capacity. 
Remember  that  I  am  talking  of  very  many 
years  ago.  I  proposed  that  he  might,  perhaps, 
be  tempted  to  make  a  great  bas-relief  of  this 
to  fill  that  space ;  but  there  were  too  many 


C  l63  3 

reasons  against  it,  among  others  those  of 
money.  A  painting  can  be  done,  it  is  supposed, 
quite  cheaply  compared  to  a  piece  of  sculp- 
ture, even  if  that  sculpture  is  only  in  plaster  at 
a  few  cents  a  foot. 

"By  and  by,  when  Stanford  White  took 
charge  of  the  church,  the  questions  came  to- 
gether and  it  was  proposed  that  I  should  paint 
the  picture  upon  the  wide  space  which  he  left 
for  it.  But  that  space  was  many,  many  times 
wider  than  the  sketch  or  study  and  even  en- 
larging the  figures  in  enormous  proportions 
would  not  fill  it.  Even  now  the  picture  is 
almost  square,  so  that  I  had  a  problem  of 
widening  my  space  of  figures  and  of  settling 
their  proportion  in  a  given  space.  Nothing  that 
I  could  do,  and  keep  the  original  intention, 
would  allow  the  change  to  be  done  to  cover 
enough  space,  so  that  I  proposed  a  frame 
which  should  both  cut  a  little  space,  indicate 
the  Gothic  character  of  the  church,  and  help 
what  I  thought  I  was  going  to  do  to  carry  out 
the  painting — that  was  to  place  these  figures 
in  a  very  big  landscape.  The  landscape  I 
wished  to  have  extremely  natural,  because  I 
depended  on  it  to  make  my  figures  also  look 
natural  and  to  account  for  the  floating  of  some 


C  164  ] 

twenty  figures  or  more  in  the  air.  We  do  not 
see  this  ever,  as  you  know,  but  I  knew  that 
by  a  combination  of  the  clouds  and  figures  I 
might  help  this  look  of  what  the  mystic  peo- 
ple call  levitation. 

<eOf  course  you  may  well  suppose  that  I 
studied  what  I  could  of  the  people  who  are 
swung  in  ropes  and  other  arrangements  across 
theatres  and  circuses.  The  question  of  the 
composition  of  the  figures  had  to  meet  certain 
geometric  conditions  in  my  mind;  that  is  to 
say,  to  fit  a  given  pattern  which  I  thought  for- 
tunate in  the  space.  I  forget  whether  it  was  an 
arrangement  of  hexagons  but  I  have  a  faint 
belief  that  it  was,  owing  to  the  arithmetical 
figures  of  the  proportions  of  the  space.  That 
could  be  settled,  but  my  landscape,  —  I  was 
much  troubled. 

"  At  that  moment  I  was  asked  to  go  to  Ja- 
pan by  my  friend  Henry  Adams,  and  I  went 
there  in  1886.  I  had  a  vague  belief  that  I 
might  find  there  certain  conditions  of  line 
in  the  mountains  which  might  help  me.  Of 
course  the  Judean  mountains  were  entirely  out 
of  question,  all  the  more  that  they  implied  a 
given  place.  I  kept  all  this  in  mind  and  on  one 
given  day  I  saw  before  me  a  space  of  moun- 


c:  i6$  3 

tain  and  cloud  and  flat  land  which  seemed  to 
me  to  be  what  was  needed.  I  gave  up  my  other 
work  and  made  thereupon  a  rapid  but  very 
careful  study,  so  complete  that  the  big  picture 
is  only  a  part  of  the  amount  of  work  put  into 
the  study  of  that  afternoon.  There  are  turns 
of  the  tide  which  allow  you  at  times  to  do  an 
amount  of  work  incredible  in  sober  moments ; 
as  you  know,  there  are  very  many  such  cases ; 
I  do  not  understand  it  myself.  When  I  re- 
turned I  was  still  of  the  same  mind.  My  stud- 
ies of  separate  figures  were  almost  ready  and 
all  I  had  to  do  was  to  stretch  the  canvas  and 
begin  the  work. 

* 6  Perhaps  you  do  not  know  that  I  got  into 
great  difficulties  thereupon.  The  weight  of 
such  a  canvas  is  something  very  great.  The 
mere  lead  paint  used  to  fasten  it  was  far  over 
five  hundred  pounds.  The  wall,  that  is  to  say, 
the  plaster  wall,  was  a  new  one,  just  made, 
and  I  felt  dubious  about  its  standing  this 
weight,  when,  as  you  know,  the  canvas  is  fas- 
tened down  and  then  pulled  flat  by  a  great 
many  men.  It  was  just  as  I  surmised.  The 
wall  tumbled  down  as  soon  as  the  canvas  was 
put  up,  or,  rather,  when  the  first  part  of  it 
was  fastened.  They  were  careful  about  the 


C  166  3 

next  wall  and  I  believe  that  it  is  now  a  safe 
one. 

"After  that  I  only  had  pleasure  out  of  my 
work.  During  that  summer  my  friend  Oka- 
kura  spent  a  great  deal  of  his  time  with  me 
and  I  could  paint,  and  then,  in  the  intervals, 
we  could  talk  about  spiritual  manifestations 
and  all  that  beautiful  wonderland  which  they 
have ;  that  is  to  say,  the  Buddhists,  where  the 
spiritual  bodies  take  form  and  disappear  again 
and  the  edges  of  the  real  and  the  imaginary 
melt.  I  had  one  objection  brought  up  by  a 
friend,  a  lady,  who  was  troubled  by  certain 
news  she  had  heard.  That  was  that  I  had  made 
these  studies  of  clouds  in  a  pagan  country, 
while  a  true  Episcopalian  would  make  them, 
I  suppose,  in  England.  Otherwise  I  think  peo- 
ple have  liked  this  and  everybody  has  been 
very  kind  about  it.  At  a  distance  the  picture  is 
not  injured,  I  think,  by  the  rapidity  of  its  exe- 
cution, only  a  summer  and  an  autumn,  during 
which  I  carried  out  several  other  large  things." 

If  a  painter  could  put  into  words  what  he 
puts  upon  canvas  he  would  perhaps  turn  writ- 
ing man  instead.  La  Farge  naturally  passes 
from  the  little  facts  connected  with  the  genesis 
of  his  work  to  just  the  pleasure  that  he  got 


C  167  3 

out  of  it.  We  hear  nothing  of  the  intricate  de- 
velopments which  left  upon  his  painting  the 
stamp  of  a  great  creative  affirmation.  In  that 
you  read  not  only  his  insight  into  a  sublime 
subject  but  his  grasp  upon  a  problem  which 
was  both  decorative  and  architectural.  The 
painting  over  the  chancel  in  the  Church  of 
the  Ascension  fills  half  the  height  of  the  fairly 
lofty  edifice.  Its  width  is  virtually  the  width  of 
the  nave.  These  dimensions  it  would  be  idle 
to  state  in  feet  and  inches,  but  they  are  impor- 
tant to  remember  broadly,  because  the  design 
is  so  well  scaled  to  its  surroundings  and  seems 
to  spring  naturally  from  that  end  of  the  church 
over  which  it  presides.  The  architectural  lines 
which  meet  the  surface  of  the  painting  mark 
neither  a  frame  nor  an  aperture  in  the  wall. 
The  richly  coffered  arch  of  gold,  springing 
from  pilasters  as  generously  embellished  with 
conventional  ornament,  seems  rather  like  some 
natural  boundary,  narrowing  the  horizon  and 
concentrating  the  vision  upon  one  moving 
scene.  Yet,  if  the  eyes  travel,  you  are  aware 
of  no  conflict  between  the  scene  and  its  en- 
circling architecture;  if  the  transition  from 
one  to  the  other  is  unconsciously  achieved,  you 
must  seek  the  secret  of  the  passage  in  the 


C  168  3 

painting  and  not  in  the  arch.  Then  you  begin 
to  grasp  the  beauty  of  a  perfect  wall  painting. 
You  see  the  harmony  between  the  upright 
figures  in  the  first  plane  of  the  composition 
and  the  pilasters  on  each  side.  And  then,  as 
you  are  insensibly  lifted  by  the  spring  of  the 
golden  arch,  the  angels  who  encircle  the  risen 
Christ  seem  to  float  in  similarly  soaring  line. 
The  central  figure,  as  it  half  pauses  in  its 
ascension,  is  the  pivot  of  the  imaginative 
conception,  the  pivot  of  the  arrangements  of 
forms  in  the  group  of  celestial  worshippers, 
and,  finally,  the  pivot  of  the  architectural 
lines. 

Take  an  even  more  subtle  point  in  the  dis- 
position of  the  lines  and  contours  in  this  paint- 
ing. As  the  spectator  faces  the  altar  he  is 
dimly  sensible  of  the  forward  leap  of  that  arch 
which  is  reared  above  the  aisle  on  each  side 
of  the  church  and  nearest  the  chancel.  The 
line  is  in  contradiction  to  that  of  the  arch  above 
the  painting.  One  comes  towards  you,  the 
other  is  calculated  to  melt  into  the  distance 
which  is  suggested  by  the  receding  angle  of 
the  golden  arch's  soffit.  Now  this  contradic- 
tion, if  left  unbalanced,  might  prove  seriously 
detrimental  to  the  unity  of  the  picture,  so  we 


C  l69  3 

find  in  the  latter  a  landscape  the  hills  of  which 
are  so  inclined  on  each  side  as  to  bring  the 
curves  of  the  entire  scheme  back  into  repose 
and  symmetry.  It  is  not  easy  to  demonstrate 
this  with  mathematical  precision  but  to  look 
closely  at  the  painting,  trying  to  imagine  the 
hills  at  the  sides  either  eliminated  or  inclined 
toward  the  mountain  in  the  middle  of  the 
background,  is  decisively  to  feel  the  force  of 
the  point  at  issue.  The  unity  of  the  thing 
would  instantly  be  endangered.  I  lay  such 
stress  upon  this  side  of  the  design,  not  to  re- 
duce its  charm  to  a  bald  question  of  line  and 
mass,  but  to  show  how  much  its  beauty  de- 
pends upon  the  adjustment  of  its  parts  to  sur- 
rounding conditions.  '  It  is  the  felicity  of  this 
adjustment  that  leaves  you  free  to  approach 
the  work  on  its  imaginative  and  personal  side, 
on  the  side  of  its  color  and  purely  sensuous 
enchantment.  Yet  even  here  the  atmosphere 
of  organic  balance  is  still  enveloping  the  pic- 
ture. The  subdued  light  by  which  its  lower 
portion  is  suffused  is  suited  not  only  to  the 
demands  of  the  composition,  but  to  the  struc- 
ture and  lighting  of  the  church  at  that  level; 
and  the  misty  golden  radiance  of  the  upper 
half  is  keyed  to  the  very  note  that  golden 


C  3 

arch  and  clerestory  windows  join  in  produc- 
ing. 

Thus  far  I  have  traced  the  beauty  of 
La  Farge's  decoration  to  its  cooperation  with 
the  architectural  ideas  expressed  in  the  same 
place.  But  it  is  the  painter's  own  ideas  that 
crown  his  work,  those,  and  the  force  with 
which  he  makes  the  picture  a  symbol  for  a 
spiritual  idea.  In  the  first  place  he  is  strikingly 
original.  The  rough  outline  of  the  composi- 
tion was  settled  centuries  ago  for  hundreds 
of  masters  and  they  were  settled  for  him  in 
the  same  way;  yet  through  the  subtleties  of 
grouping  and  gesture  he  has  escaped  the 
faintest  suggestion  of  any  of  his  predecessors. 
If  he  recalls  them  at  all  it  is  in  the  sincerity 
with  which  he  has  bodied  forth  his  idea.  The 
Christ  rises  with  thrilling  dignity  above  the 
astonished  worshippers  who  gaze  in  awe  upon 
His  flight,  and  the  benignant  gesture,  familiar 
as  it  is,  has  yet  in  this  modern  painting  a  vi- 
tality for  which  hitherto  we  have  had  to  go  to 
the  old  Italians.  Indeed,  there  is  nothing  more 
interesting  about  this  design  than  its  proof  of 
the  strength  still  living  in  sacred  art  when  the 
painter  is  a  man  of  genius  as  well  as  a  finished 
craftsman.  In  all  that  makes  religious  art  re- 


t  171  ] 

ligious  this  is  a  just  equivalent  for  the  art  of 
an  older  faith.  In  the  presence  of  the  sacred 
pictures  of  the  fourteenth  and  fifteenth  cen- 
turies we  talk  of  an  illusion  which  we  fear 
has  since  been  lost,  and  declare  that  the  day 
for  Biblical  illustration  is  gone  by.  La  Farge 
gives  the  best  possible  answer  to  this  pessi- 
mistic conclusion.  Nobly  designed,  flooded 
with  color  of  the  deepest  splendor  and  most 
exquisite  delicacy,  imbued  with  the  spirituality 
of  a  high  imagination,  his  painting  puts  before 
you,  on  the  heroic  scale  which  it  demands,  the 
scene  which  marks  the  culmination  of  our 
Christian  faith.  It  must  be  a  cold  tempera- 
ment which  could  find  in  this  uplifting  crea- 
tion less  of  fervor,  less  of  the  power  to  con- 
vince, than  we  are  willing  to  believe  a  more 
naive  epoch  found  in  its  more  naive  produc- 
tions. 

La  Farge  never  painted  anything  more 
purely  beautiful  than  "The  Ascension"  and 
it  might  not  unreasonably  be  taken  as  sum- 
ming up  his  qualities  as  a  mural  decorator; 
but  there  is  one  other  triumph  of  his  in  this 
field  upon  which  I  wish  to  dwell,  partly  on 
account  of  its  magnitude  and  even  more  in 
view  of  its  intellectual  and  architectonic  vir- 


I  »7»  2 

tues.  When  Mr.  Cass  Gilbert  designed  the 
monumental  State  Capitol  of  Minnesota  at 
St.  Paul,  some  eight  or  nine  years  ago,  he  was 
permitted  by  the  authorities  to  carry  out  his 
idea  of  completing  the  building  in  a  spirit 
worthy  of  a  great  commonwealth.  To  this 
end  he  arranged  for  a  number  of  mural  deco- 
rations on  a  large  scale  from  various  hands. 
To  La  Farge  was  assigned  a  weighty  share 
in  the  task.  For  the  Supreme  Court  room  he 
was  commissioned  to  execute  four  paintings, 
filling  spacious  lunettes.  In  the  first  of  these 
he  dealt  with  "The  Moral  and  Divine  Law," 
his  central  figure  being  Moses  kneeling  on 
Mount  Sinai.  In  the  second  lunette  he  con- 
cerned himself  with  "  The  Relation  of  the 
Individual  to  the  State,"  representing  a  dis- 
cussion between  Socrates  and  his  friends.  The 
next  painting  in  the  series  treats  of  "The  Re- 
cording of  Precedents  "  and  Confucius  domi- 
nates here,  busied  with  his  pupils  over  the 
collation  and  transcription  of  documents.  Fi- 
nally, in  commemoration  of  "The  Adjust- 
ment of  Conflicting  Interests,"  the  artist 
shows  Count  Raymond  of  Toulouse  swearing 
at  the  altar,  in  the  presence  of  ecclesiastical 
and  civic  dignitaries,  to  observe  the  liberties 


C  173  ^ 

of  the  city.  "  In  each  one  of  these  four  paint- 
ings," says  La  Farge,  in  a  brief  statement 
printed  at  the  time,  "  the  intention  has  been  to 
give  to  each  separate  work  the  sense  of  a 
special  and  different  historical  moment.  Con- 
sequently of  a  very  different  attitude  of  mind 
in  the  actors  of  each  drama.  For  this  purpose, 
also,  differing  lights  and  colors  for  each  pic- 
ture." Magnificently  he  rose  to  the  height  of 
his  great  argument.  In  the  "Moses,"  wherein 
"  the  forces  of  nature  and  of  the  human  con- 
science are  meant  to  be  typified/'  he  pro- 
duced a  masterpiece  of  creative  art  worthy 
of  the  Renaissance  in  its  pregnant  simplicity. 

The  scene  represented  in  this  decoration  is 
one  of  solemn  grandeur.  Looming  up  in  the 
centre  of  it  is  a  rocky  eminence  of  tawny 
hues,  save  where  a  few  natural  growths  bring 
some  green  into  the  scheme.  On  the  left  the 
landscape  falls  as  though  into  an  abyss,  and 
the  eye  travels  over  sinister  peaks,  half  veiled 
in  purple  vapors,  until  a  rift  in  the  sky  flings 
golden  light  upon  the  mountain.  On  the  high- 
est plane  in  the  composition  Moses  kneels,  a 
rough-hewn,  massy,  sculptural  figure,  with 
the  austere  profile  of  his  face  partially  con- 
cealed by  arms  extended  in  prayer.  This 


C  174  2 

figure  is  full  of  meaning.  One  is  especially 
struck  by  the  dignity  of  the  head  and  the 
mute  eloquence  of  the  arms  and  hands.  But 
the  entire  body  is,  indeed,  obviously  under 
the  stress  of  a  supernatural  emotion.  It  is  easy 
to  imagine  how  theatrical  or  academic  it 
might  have  become  in  the  hands  of  an  ordi- 
nary painter.  With  La  Farge  the  skilful  han- 
dling of  form  and  drapery,  admirable  in  itself, 
is,  after  all,  only  a  means  to  an  end.  His  main 
point  is  to  make  us  feel  that  he  has  portrayed 
a  great  man  in  a  moment  of  supreme  exalta- 
tion, and  he  carries  absolute  conviction.  On 
the  lower  slopes  of  the  mount,  the  kneeling 
figure  of  Aaron  is  shown,  and,  towering 
above  him,  every  inch  a  man,  is  Joshua,  warn- 
ing the  people  from  the  scene.  Fire,  not  in 
sharp  flames  but  in  rosy  billows,  gives  a 
ghastly  splendor  to  the  painting.  In  the 
broad  blocking  out  of  his  composition,  and  in 
the  atmosphere  communicated  to  it,  La  Farge 
works  on  a  lofty  plane ;  he  is  majestic  and 
sacerdotal,  introducing  us  into  a  sort  of  pri- 
meval world,  where  man  recognizes  in  awe 
and  trembling  the  nearness  of  Divinity. 

In  illustrating  "The  Relation  of  the  Indi- 
vidual to  the  State"  he  took  his  scene  from 


i  175  n 

that  opening  book  of  the  "Republic  "  in  which 
Socrates  is  represented  as  engaged  in  discus- 
sion with  friends  in  the  circle  of  Polemarchus. 
"In  this  painting/'  he  says  in  the  leaflet  al- 
ready cited,  "there  has  been  no  strict  inten- 
tion of  giving  an  adequate,  and  therefore, 
impossible  historical  representation  of  some- 
thing which  may  never  have  happened.  But 
there  has  been  a  wish  to  convey,  in  a  typical 
manner,  the  serenity  and  good  nature  which 
is  the  note  of  the  famous  book  and  of  Greek 
thought  and  philosophy/'  Obviously,  then, 
there  is  no  occasion  for  dwelling  on  the  per- 
sonal significance,  such  as  it  is,  of  those  with 
whom  Socrates  is  conversing.  Details  are  no- 
thing; the  broad  idea  of  Socrates  on  "the 
interdependence  of  man,"  is  everything.  Yet 
in  the  very  moment  of  reading  La  Farge's  dis- 
claimer of  a  pedantically  historical  intention, 
we  are  struck,  as  we  raise  our  eyes  to  the 
painting,  with  a  sense  of  the  familiar  human 
reality  he  has  given  to  something  which,  as  he 
says,  "may  never  have  happened."  This  is  a 
scene  from  Plato.  It  is,  as  vividly,  a  scene 
from  Greek  life.  Plato  himself  sketches  the 
matter  with  inimitable  realism.  When  we 
meet  Socrates  on  the  threshold  of  the  "Re- 


I  176  ] 

public,' '  he  is  not  simply  the  philosopher  but 
the  curious  traveller,  relishing  the  delight  to 
the  eye  provided  by  the  Bendidean  festival. 
The  incident  of  his  encounter  with  the  man 
who  wished  to  hold  him  in  talk  is  photo- 
graphed for  us  as  with  a  modern  camera. 
Says  Socrates,  in  Jowett's  version:  — 

"When  we  had  finished  our  prayers  and 
viewed  the  spectacle,  we  turned  in  the  direc- 
tion of  the  city;  and  at  that  instant  Pole- 
marchus,  the  son  of  Cephalus,  chanced  to 
catch  sight  of  us  from  a  distance  as  we  were 
starting  on  our  way  home,  and  told  his  ser- 
vant to  run  and  bid  us  wait  for  him.  The  ser- 
vant took  hold  of  me  by  the  cloak  behind,  and 
said:  'Polemarchus  desires  you  to  wait/  I 
turned  round  and  asked  him  where  his  master 
was.  6 There  he  is/  said  the  youth,  'coming 
after  you  if  you  will  only  wait.' " 

In  this  passage,  and  in  all  that  follows  to 
show  how  Socrates  was  prevailed  upon  to  turn 
his  steps  toward  the  house  of  Cephalus,  we 
are  carried  into  the  very  intimacy  of  Greek 
society,  we  are  conscious  of  its  sights  and 
sounds,  and  breathe  its  bland  airs.  LaFarge 
does  what  Plato  does  and  actually  re-creates 
for  us  the  beautiful  ancient  world.  Classical 


C  177  3 

antiquity  is  not,  for  him,  the  cold,  skeletonized 
affair  which  has  satisfied  so  many  "  archaeo- 
logical" painters.  He  brings  an  architectural 
motive  into  his  composition  in  the  marble  ex- 
hedra  within  whose  limits  his  principal  figures 
are  grouped,  and,  no  doubt,  in  painting  So- 
crates, he  was  influenced  by  memories  of 
Greek  plastic  art.  But  he  portrayed  the  phil- 
osopher and  his  friends  as  men  first  and  types 
of  the  ancient  world  afterward.  Their  easy 
attitudes  are  significant  of  his  aim,  from  those 
of  the  three  leading  figures  to  the  casual, 
mildly  interested  pose  of  the  slave  girl  who 
leans  on  the  parapet  in  the  foreground.  Equally 
effective  in  creating  a  natural  impression  is 
the  atmosphere  in  which  the  whole  scene  is 
drenched,  an  atmosphere  borrowing  much 
from  the  leafage  in  the  background  and  even 
more  from  the  landscape  filling  the  distant 
planes. 

The  color  is  superb,  handled  in  many  pas- 
sages with  great  delicacy,  but,  on  the  whole, 
with  a  feeling  for  broad  and  weighty  tones. 
The  masses  of  light  marble  in  the  scene  are 
suffused  with  a  pinkish  glow.  Above  them  the 
dark  green  of  the  trees  is  flecked  with  tawny 
tints  and  beyond,  where  La  Farge  recovered 


c  n 

the  charioteer  of  one  of  his  early  drawings,  the 
red  tunic  of  the  driver  and  the  white  coats  of 
the  horses  tell  sharply  against  the  greens  and 
purples  of  the  landscape.  The  central  figure, 
one  of  the  listeners,  is  clothed  in  red;  Socrates 
wears  a  robe  in  which  notes  of  violet  and  white 
commingle ;  and  his  seated  friend,  to  whom  he 
more  particularly  addresses  himself,  is  swathed 
in  draperies  of  a  greenish,  bronze-like  yellow, 
relieved  by  stuff  of  a  darker  hue.  The  shoul- 
ders of  a  youth  who  sits  with  his  back  toward 
the  spectator  are  wrapped  in  material  of  tour- 
quoise  blue  and  the  girl  has  touches  of  violet 
and  gray-white  in  her  dress.  The  rose  color  of 
the  sweetbriar  brings  still  another  accent  of 
sensuous  charm  into  the  scene,  where  a  vine 
clambers  over  the  exhedra.  As  a  colorist  La 
Farge  adheres  to  the  severe  harmony  of  his 
whole  plan  but  everywhere  shows  his  charac- 
teristic subtlety  and  fineness. 

It  was  preeminently  in  the  role  of  a  colorist 
that  La  Farge  illuminated  the  big  spaces  of  his 
room  at  St.  Paul,  but  I  prefer  to  terminate 
this  partial  description  of  the  work  that  he  did 
there  with  some  remarks  on  "The  Recording 
of  Precedents/ '  the  composition  dedicated  to 
Confucius,  as  I  was  privileged  to  see  it  in  the 


cartoon.  The  cartoon  as  he  used  it  was  not 
so  much  a  preliminary  study,  to  be  modified 
under  the  influence  of  mood  as  the  process 
of  actual  painting  was  carried  on,  but  a  true 
foundation,  prepared  for  the  superimposition 
of  pigment  j  ust  as  the  foundation  of  a  building 
is  prepared  for  the  walls.  If  he  was  a  brilliant 
colorist  he  was  also  a  brilliant  draughtsman 
and  a  master  of  design.  The  Orientals  he 
brought  together  in  the  grove  of  Confucius 
were  beautifully  drawn  at  the  first  stage  of 
the  work  and  then,  as  later,  their  expressions, 
attitudes,  and  relations  toone  another  disclosed 
the  quality  separating  the  creative  artist  from 
the  facile  but  superficial  practitioner  of  pic- 
torial narrative.  The  figures  were  true  types 
of  eastern  intellectuality  and  spirituality  and 
as  they  sat  absorbed  in  their  devotional  work 
in  a  green  silence  they  appealed  to  me  at  once 
by  the  intimacy  of  their  grouping  and  by  the 
dignity  of  the  spectacle  they  presented.  De- 
claring their  purpose,  not  in  obvious  ways,  but 
in  the  indescribable  manner  signifying  a  move- 
ment of  the  mind  expressed  in  a  movement 
of  the  body,  the  pose  of  a  head,  the  play  of 
a  hand,  those  figures  made  it  plain  that  they 
were  engaged  upon  matters  of  grave  moment. 


[  i8o  ] 

Though  the  color  was  to  add  so  much  more  its 
absence  was  really  a  benefit  to  the  observer, 
for  in  the  strokes  of  charcoal  and  crayon  he 
could  see  the  very  bones  of  the  fabric  and  the 
better  appreciate  La  Farge's  articulation  of 
them.  One  could  see  what  an  affair  of  con- 
struction a  great  work  of  art  actually  is,  how 
the  ultimate  glowing  picture  rests  upon  a  basis 
of  truth  rigidly  defined.  Every  tangible  factor 
in  the  composition  was  carefully  set  forth.  It 
was  not  that  the  drawing  was  minutely  re- 
alistic but  rather  that  the  essentials  of  form 
which  the  artist  wished  to  express  were 
grasped  with  insight  and  effectively  stated. 
There  was  no  boggling  over  a  difficulty. 
There  were  no  obscurities  anywhere.  The 
elements  in  the  design  were  simply  reduced 
to  their  simplest  and  strongest  terms.  It  was 
done,  moreover,  with  wonderful  breadth,  the 
details  being  fused  together  into  an  imposing 
whole.  The  line  was  full  and  rich.  The  model- 
ling had  subtlety  and  power.  You  felt  that  the 
color  would  come  in  inevitable  sequence,  like 
an  integument  for  a  body  already  having  an 
animated  existence. 

La  Farge  was  amused  by  the  puzzlement 
of  some  of  his  friends  over  his  mode  of  work. 


I  *8l  ] 

They  could  not  always  understand  his  not 
making  quantities  of  studies  in  color  before 
he  laid  out  his  cartoon,  but,  as  he  said  to  me, 
the  preliminary  work  in  black  and  white  was 
equally  important  with  that  which  was  to  fol- 
low. Moreover,  in  the  color  stage  there  were 
bound  to  be  some  modifications,  and,  said 
he,  "you  don't  start  with  your  modifications." 
When  he  was  painting  the  decoration  to  which 
I  have  just  referred  he  indulged  himself  in  a 
playful  comment  on  this  subject.  Confucius  is 
reading  from  a  scroll  and  on  this  La  Farge  got 
Okakura  to  help  him  inscribe  in  Chinese  char- 
acters one  of  the  Sage's  sayings,  "First  the 
white,  and  then  the  color  on  top."  He  loved 
to  talk  about  Confucius,  whom  he  had  found 
as  interesting  as  a  novel  when  he  was  study- 
ing him  with  Okakura's  help,  and  he  told  me 
an  odd  story  of  what  then  happened  to  him. 
He  painted  another  Confucius  in  one  of  the 
panels  which  he  placed  in  the  Court  House  at 
Baltimore  and  for  purely  decorative  reasons 
he  wanted  a  perpendicular  mass  in  the  centre 
of  it.  Finally,  he  thought  of  putting  a  white 
curtain  behind  Confucius  to  shield  him  from 
the  air  as  he  sat,  after  his  wont,  beneath  a  fa- 
vorite tree.  Okakura,  coming  in,  was  greatly 


C  182  3 

astonished  at  La  Farge's  scholarship  and  told 
him  that  Confucius  had  various  names,  one  of 
them  being  the  Man  of  the  Curtain.  But  the 
artist  had  only  been  solving  a  technical  prob- 
lem. He  recalled  the  story  of  Confucius  one 
day  making  a  little  music,  as  he  always  did, 
before  he  began  work.  A  disciple  said  to  him, 
"  That  was  not  like  you ;  it  sounded  so  cruel." 
The  master  replied  that  he  had  seen  a  rat  in 
the  grass  which  a  cat  had  killed,  and,  said  he, 
"The  cruelty  got  into  my  music.,,  " There," 
remarked  La  Farge,  "you  have  your  modern 
music.  What  you  see  and  feel,  what  goes  on 
about  you,  goes  into  your  work."  It  is  with  a 
sense  of  his  own  subjection  to  that  law  of  hu- 
man experience  that  we  leave  him  as  a  painter, 
pouring  into  all  that  he  did  the  abounding  sub- 
stance of  his  nature  and  his  life. 


VI 


GLASS 

LA  FARGE  had  the  pride  of  an  inventor 
in  his  glass.  He  knew  that  where  that  was 
concerned  he  had  had  no  predecessors  in 
America,  that  none  of  his  numerous  followers 
had  ever  quite  rivalled  him  or  was  likely  to 
do  so,  and  he  knew,  finally,  that  his  windows 
had  done  more  than  anything  else  to  spread  his 
fame  abroad.  One  afternoon  in  Paris  I  sat 
with  Ary  Renan  and  reasoned  with  him  to  the 
best  of  my  ability,  trying  to  show  him  that 
the  art  of  America  did  not  consist,  entirely  and 
everlastingly,  of  the  work  of  those  few  paint- 
ers who  had  expatriated  themselves  and  given 
away  their  birthright  for  a  mess  of  Salon  pot- 
tage. Of  men  like  Winslow  Homer  he  ap- 
peared never  to  have  heard,  and  of  La  Farge's 
pictures  and  decorations  he  had  only  the  ha- 
ziest idea.  But  he  knew  all  about  La  Farge's 
glass;  on  that  point  he  was  quite  clear.  Had 
not  the  French  government  bestowed  the  in- 
signia of  the  Legion  of  Honor  upon  the 
American  artist,  when  he  exhibited  the  Wat- 


son  Memorial  window  at  the  Paris  Exposi- 
tion in  1889?  Not  content  with  awarding  a 
medal  of  the  first  class  to  that  piece  of  work 
the  artists  of  the  jury  paid  him  this  tribute  in 
their  report : 

"His  work  cannot  be  fully  gauged  here, 
where  a  single  window  represents  a  name  the 
most  celebrated  and  widely  known  in  our 
Sister  Republic.  He  is  the  great  innovator, 
the  inventor  of  opaline  glass.  He  has  created 
in  all  its  details  an  art  unknown  before,  an  en- 
tirely new  industry,  and  in  a  country  without 
tradition  he  will  begin  one  followed  by  thou- 
sands of  pupils  filled  with  the  same  respect 
for  him  that  we  have  ourselves  for  our  own 
masters.  To  share  in  this  respect  is  the  high- 
est praise  that  we  can  give  to  this  great  artist." 

I  think  that  La  Farge  valued  these  words 
and  his  affiliation  to  the  Legion  of  Honor  above 
almost  any  of  the  numerous  other  rewards 
that  his  career  had  brought  him.  In  the  first 
place,  while  the  point  has  nothing  to  do  with 
the  action  of  the  jury,  there  was  in  the  episode 
an  unspoken  recognition  of  a  tie  of  blood ;  he 
liked  to  feel  that  officially,  in  a  sense,  he  was 
now  a  Frenchman,  too;  and  then,  of  course, 
it  was  consoling  to  have  his  fruitful  labors  as 


The  Peacock  Window 


C  l83  1 

a  pioneer  thus  ratified  before  the  world  at  the 
very  focus  of  the  world's  artistic  endeavors. 
There  was  something  magisterial  about  his 
attitude  toward  glass,  like  that  of  the  founder 
of  a  great  movement  in  the  sphere  of  purely 
practical  things,  or  even  like  that  of  a  com- 
mander who  had  won  crucial  battles  and 
was  thereafter  in  a  position  to  assert  himself. 
Self-assertion  was,  to  be  sure,  abhorrent  to 
La  Farge's  nature,  but  when  he  spoke  on  glass 
he  spoke  ex  cathedra  —  and  he  knew  it.  He 
spoke  and  he  wrote  with  some  copiousness  on 
the  subject  and  I  might  proceed  at  once  to 
cite  passages  in  which  he  gathered  up  the 
threads  of  experience,  but  not  all  of  his  formal 
communications  had  the  charm  of  his  intimate 
speech  and  accordingly  I  tell  the  story  of  his 
beginnings  in  glass  very  much  as  he  told  it 
to  me. 

They  flowed,  he  said,  from  very  practical 
causes.  Sometime  in  the  seventies,  when  he 
was  just  back  from  England,  he  found  that  he 
could  not  sell  his  pictures.  Durand-Ruel  had 
proposed  to  exploit  his  work  in  Paris  and 
London,  looking  after  his  interests  much  as  he 
had  looked  after  those  of  Monet  and  the  other 
Impressionists,  sending  his  pictures  to  shows, 


C  186  3 

urging  them  upon  collectors,  and,  in  general, 
"  pushing  him."  The  eminent  dealer  thought 
that  in  five  years  or  so  he  could  "make  a 
market"  and  get  for  La  Farge  prices  equal  to 
those  which  he  obtained  in  America,  when  he 
sold  his  pictures  at  all.  The  scheme  had  its  ad- 
vantages, and  those  not  merely  of  a  financial 
order.  To  it  he  owed  his  first  real  public 
triumph.  Durand-Ruel  had  a  show  in  London 
and  hung  a  landscape  of  La  Farge's,  one  of 
his  Newport  studies,  "  The  Last  Valley,"  be- 
tween a  Rousseau  and  a  Delacroix.  It  held  its 
own  against  that  stern  test.  But  the  artistic 
success  did  n't  pay  bills ;  at  home  he  was 
making  practically  nothing  out  of  his  pictures, 
and  so  he  was  much  interested  when  his  friend 
Van  Brunt,  of  the  firm  of  architects,  Ware 
and  Van  Brunt,  proposed  his  doing  one  of  the 
windows  for  Memorial  Hall  at  Harvard. 

He  was  the  more  in  the  mood  for  this  ven- 
ture because,  for  some  five  or  six  months  in 
England,  his  interest  in  glass  had  been  stimu- 
lated by  intercourse  with  the  pre-Raphaelite 
Brotherhood.  He  had  vivid  memories  of  the 
band.  Burne-Jones  was  interesting,  but  there 
were  queer  blank  walls  in  his  make-up  that 
you  bumped  your  head  against.  Rossetti  was 


I  187  ] 

unmistakably  the  bigger  man,  much  more 
exciting  to  know.  He  made  you  feel  that 
whether  his  painting  or  poetry  "came  off"  or 
not  it  was  the  real  thing.  La  Farge  saw,  per- 
haps, more  of  Ford  Madox  Brown  than  of  any 
of  the  others  and  preserved  a  special  fondness 
for  him.  Brown  was  peculiarly  friendly  to  the 
American  down  to  the  end  of  his  life.  Well, 
living  amongst  the  pre-Raphaelites  and  seeing 
all  their  enthusiasm  over  stained  glass  he  was 
in  the  very  vein  to  execute  Van  Brunt's  com- 
mission. But  he  could  not  satisfy  himself,  and 
when  the  window  was  finished  he  would  not 
allow  it  to  be  put  up ;  he  forthwith  destroyed 
it.  This  was  not,  however,  a  confession  of  de- 
feat. Having  got  interested  he  kept  at  it,  de- 
spite heart-breaking  discouragements.  Good 
glass  was  almost  unobtainable.  Powell,  an 
English  manufacturer  in  great  vogue,  could 
only  send  over  here  a  few  limited  "palettes." 
And  just  then  the  gods  smiled.  La  Farge  was 
in  bed,  getting  over  an  illness,  and  pottering 
with  designs  of  one  sort  or  another,  when  he 
glanced  at  the  trifling  receptacle  on  the  toilet 
table  containing  his  tooth-powder,  a  thing  of 
cheap  colored  glass,  through  which,  however, 
at  that  psychological  moment,  the  light  was 


[  188  ] 

sending  some  transforming  rays.  In  an  in- 
stant he  divined  immeasurable  possibilities 
and  saw  ahead  of  him  the  opalescent  glass 
which  he  was  before  very  long  to  develop.  As 
soon  as  he  got  well  and  on  his  feet  again  he 
looked  about  him  for  the  means  of  carrying 
out  his  experiments.  Over  in  Brooklyn  he  ran 
to  earth  a  Luxembourg  glass-maker,  with 
whom  he  would  sit  drinking  beer  and  talking 
until  he  had  got  him  interested  in  his  plans  and 
committed  to  a  share  in  them.  Thenceforth 
things  went  rapidly  better  and  better.  Having 
done  over  again  the  big  Harvard  window  for 
Van  Brunt  he  undertook  more  work  for  the 
same  architect,  in  private  houses,  and  pres- 
ently made  for  McKim  a  window  which 
seemed  to  put  the  seal  upon  all  his  efforts. 
This  was  one  for  the  house  of  Dr.  Richard 
H.  Derby.  The  pattern  in  it  he  took  from  a 
carpet  in  one  of  the  illustrations  of  the  "  Hyp- 
nerotomachia,,,  borrowing  for  the  purpose 
from  Charles  Eliot  Norton  the  rare  copy  of 
the  book  which  is  now  in  the  possession  of 
Mr.  Francis  Bullard  of  Boston.  All  the  archi- 
tects were  surprised  at  his  design,  and,  to  La 
Farge's  huge  entertainment,  never  guessed 
its  Renaissance  origin.  The  window  was  in 


1 n 

every  way  a  great  success  and  when  La  Farge 
told  me  this,  some  three  years  ago,  he  still  re- 
garded it  as  one  of  his  best  performances.  It  is 
now,  by  the  way,  in  Dr.  Derby's  house  in 
Maine. 

By  the  time  he  died  La  Farge  had  made 
several  thousand  windows,  of  all  sizes  and 
kinds,  little  windows  that  counted  as  unobtru- 
sive notes  in  decorative  schemes  and  outstand- 
ing designs  which  approximate  in  scale  and  in 
pictorial  interest  to  the  standard  he  erected 
in  mural  painting.  An  immense  amount  of 
energy  went  to  the  development  of  this  body 
of  work,  which  involved  not  only  the  produc- 
tion of  glass  and  the  making  of  designs  but  the 
training  up  of  a  new  type  of  workman  and  the 
incessant  supervision  of  affairs  in  the  shop.  It 
is  not  surprising  that  through  some  of  these 
years  painting  was  almost  totally  abandoned; 
but  the  time  came  when  La  Farge  not  only 
took  it  up  again  but  used  his  brush  on  the 
large  mural  decorations  we  have  traversed. 
One  marvels  how  a  man  so  frequently  broken 
down  by  illness  as  he  was  ever  contrived  to 
master  the  little  cosmos  in  which  he  lived.  It 
was,  of  course,  his  genius  that  pulled  him 
through,  his  passionate  delight  in  work,  so 


[  190  ] 

that  fatigue  could  never  wear  him  down,  and 
that  curious  spiritual  conviction  of  having  a 
mission,  an  inspiration,  and  the  ability  to  re- 
alize it,  which  buoys  the  great  artist  up  and 
sustains  him  where  lesser  men  would  fall. 

In  the  all  too  brief  interpretation  of  La 
Farge  by  Mr.  Henry  Adams,  upon  which  I 
drew  in  my  first  chapter,  there  is  a  passage 
which  delicately  enforces  the  predestination  of 
his  friend  to  greatness  in  glass,  as  one  taking 
up  by  right  a  heritage  denied  to  all  other 
modern  craftsmen.  They  met  in  Paris  in  the 
fall  of  1899,  and  one  of  the  places  they  vis- 
ited together  was  Chartres,  the  shrine  of  the 
worker  in  glass.  Mr.  Adams  thus  paints  La 
Farge  in  the  cathedral  whose  glory  owes  so 
much  to  his  spiritual  forefathers :  — 

"  With  the  relative  value  of  La  Farge's 
glass  in  the  history  of  glass-decoration, 
Adams  was  too  ignorant  to  meddle,  and  as 
a  rule  artists  were  if  possible  more  ignorant 
than  he ;  but  whatever  it  was,  it  led  him  back 
to  the  twelfth  century  and  to  Chartres  where 
La  Farge  not  only  felt  at  home,  but  felt  a  sort 
of  ownership.  No  other  American  had  a  right 
there,  unless  he  too  were  a  member  of  the 
Church  and  worked  in  glass.  Adams  himself 


C  191  3 

was  an  interloper,  but  long  habit  led  La  Farge 
to  resign  himself  to  Adams  as  one  who  meant 
well  though  deplorably  Bostonian;  while 
Adams  though  near  sixty  years  old  before 
he  knew  anything  either  of  glass  or  of  Char- 
tres,  asked  no  better  than  to  learn,  and  only 
La  Farge  could  help  him,  for  he  knew  enough 
at  least  to  see  that  La  Farge  alone  could  use 
glass  like  a  thirteenth-century  artist.  In  Eu- 
rope the  art  had  been  dead  for  centuries,  and 
modern  glass  was  pitiable.  Even  La  Farge 
felt  the  early  glass  rather  as  a  document  than 
as  a  historical  emotion,  and  in  hundreds  of 
windows  at  Chartres  and  Bourges  and  Paris, 
Adams  knew  barely  one  or  two  that  were 
meant  to  hold  their  own  against  a  color- 
scheme  so  strong  as  his." 

It  was  his  color  again,  and  even  more  than 
in  his  mural  painting,  that  proclaimed  La 
Farge's  authority  in  glass,  his  kinship  with 
the  old  masters ;  but  there  was  an  element  in 
the  situation,  equally  indispensable,  which  I 
can  only  describe  as  the  instinct  of  the  artist 
for  the  workshop.  He  had  the  craftsman's 
hand,  which  must  touch  and  mould  substances. 
When  he  designed  a  window  he  built  it  in  the 
fullest  sense  of  the  term.  We  have  noted  the 


importance  he  attached  to  the  deeply  pon- 
dered elaboration  of  a  cartoon  for  a  wall  paint- 
ing. It  was  the  same  in  his  work  in  glass  and 
it  disappointed  him  when,  even  among  archi- 
tects, the  fundamental  construction  of  one  of 
his  windows  missed  appreciation.  He  sent  me 
some  photographs  exhibiting  a  window  before 
the  stage  of  color  and  wrote:  "The  manner 
by  which  I  build  a  window  usually  conceals 
the  inside  skeleton  and  I  am  often  supposed 
to  begin  upside  down.  Two  years  ago  I  had 
great  difficulty  in  making  one  of  our  best 
known  architects  understand  —  if  indeed  he 
did  understand  or  believe  —  that  I  did  not  be- 
gin my  painting  by  a  color  sketch,  any  more 
than  he  did  one  of  his  big  buildings.  Because 
I  happen  to  be  sensitive  to  color  he  supposed 
that  I  must  not  attend  to  drawing.  It  occurred 
to  me  that  it  might  amuse  you  to  see  the  way 
that  I  begin  a  window.  As  you  will  see,  the 
whole  frame  is  about  constructed  and  would 
almost  stand  up  for  itself  without  any  glass, 
without  any  color  and  with  little  modelling. 
This  then  is  a  study  of  line  and  is  different 
from  the  notion  of  some  of  my  intellectual 
friends  that  the  line  is  to  be  put  on  afterward." 
This  question  of  line  involved  for  him,  too, 


the  larger  question  of  an  artist's  getting  his 
personality  into  his  work.  He  could  not  paint 
a  picture  by  the  simple  process  of  drawing  it 
in  outline  and  handing  it  over  to  an  assistant 
to  execute.  If  he  sent  a  design  for  a  window 
to  the  workshop  and  there  left  it  to  take  care 
of  itself  he  knew  that,  even  under  the  hands 
of  the  remarkably  skilful  workmen  he  had 
formed,  the  essence  of  his  style  would  evapo- 
rate. He  knew  that  by  instinct  and  he  knew  it 
by  observation  of  actual  work  done  in  glass. 
For  a  report  to  the  French  government  writ- 
ten by  M.  Bing  in  1893  he  composed  some 
notes  on  his  experience  and  practice.  At  the 
outset  he  emphasizes  his  belief  in  the  neces- 
sity of  a  close  alliance  between  studio  and 
workshop :  — 

"  I  thought  that  I  had  noticed  in  the  work 
of  the  English  artists  in  stained  glass  that  they 
had  come  to  the  end  of  their  rope,  and  that 
their  work  in  glass  had  ceased  improving,  and 
it  seemed  to  me  that  the  cause  of  this  was 
mainly  because  the  designer  had  become  sep- 
arated from  the  men  who  made  the  actual 
window.  I  do  not  mean  separated  in  sympathy 
but  that  they  no  longer  followed  the  mechan- 
ism now  that  they  had  learned  it,  and  conse- 


[  194  2 

quently  that  whatever  they  did  was  only  ex- 
pressed in  the  manner  that  had  first  been  used 
for  their  design.  Moreover  they  made  designs 
for  the  drawing  and  not  for  the  result ;  beau- 
tiful drawings  —  bad  result !  It  occurred  to  me 
that  if  I  made  a  design  for  stained  glass  to  be 
carried  out  as  was  proposed  in  this  country, 
that  I  should  follow  the  entire  manufacture, 
selecting  the  colors  myself,  and  watching 
every  detail/ ' 

He  did  this,  and,  into  the  bargain,  as  I  have 
previously  noted,  he  moved  heaven  and  earth 
to  make  up  for  the  poverty  of  material  by 
which  he  was  confronted.  His  Luxembourg 
glass  maker  worked  under  his  eye.  He  im- 
ported glass  from  the  European  makers.  He 
built  up  tones  by  placing  different  pieces  of 
glass  in  layers  and  studied  the  juxtaposition  of 
different  notes  of  color  —  an  important  point, 
for  the  play  of  light  through  a  window  natu- 
rally has  something  like  a  chemical  effect  upon 
two  or  more  clustered  bits  of  glass,  not  one  in 
the  cluster  escaping  modification  through  the 
influence  of  its  neighbor.  He  dealt  with  a  pas- 
sage in  glass  as  with  one  in  a  painting,  devel- 
oping countless  subtle  gradations  of  color; 
and,  simultaneously  with  this  pursuit  of  the 


Fruit  and  Flower  Garland 


C  195  J 

more  obvious  resources  of  his  craft,  he  beat 
out  new  methods  of  holding  his  composition 
together.  Not  content  with  giving  to  his  lead 
lines  a  dignity  and  meaning  unknown  to  his 
contemporaries,  he  devised  "  a  sort  of  variation 
of  cloisonne,  made  by  joining  glass  by  thin  fila- 
ments of  metal  fused  to  the  glass  and  plated  on 
both  sides  with  different  surfaces  of  glass  ad- 
hering." But  it  is  needless  to  trace  all  the 
ramifications  of  his  technical  inventiveness.  It 
is  the  character  of  his  glass  that  counts. 

At  the  roots  of  that  character  was  La  Farge's 
understanding  of  the  true  office  of  convention 
in  art.  Convention  has  for  generations  suffered 
in  repute  because  it  has  so  often  been  the  ref- 
uge of  the  slack  intelligence,  but  to  La  Farge 
it  was  a  precious  instrument.  Books  and  pho- 
tographs were  at  his  hand  and  he  carried  in 
his  brain  a  kind  of  anthology  of  all  the  deco- 
rative styles ;  but  not  if  he  had  tried  could  he 
have  used  them  in  the  wooden,  literal  way  of 
the  unimaginative  artist.  His  friends  had  not 
divined  the  source  of  his  pattern  in  the  Derby 
window.  He  baffled  them  in  all  his  windows. 
Wherever  he  found  a  motive,  his  rehandling 
of  it  presently  made  it  very  much  his  own. 
And  yet,  so  ingrained  was  his  sense  of  order 


and  tradition,  that  his  window  might  be  never 
so  original  and  still  it  would  admit  a  certain 
kinship  with  historic  schools  of  design.  I  have 
in  mind,  for  example,  a  window  for  a  house  in 
New  York  in  which  simulated  pilasters,  cor- 
nice and  sill  reproduce  the  carved  framework 
of  a  window  in  an  old  Florentine  palazzo.  The 
note  of  the  Renaissance  is  unmistakable.  Be- 
tween the  pilasters  in  the  centre  of  the  win- 
dow the  clou  of  the  design  is  supplied  by  a 
mass  of  flowers  and  leafage,  which  it  is  equally 
obvious  was  worked  out  under  the  influence 
of  Japanese  art.  The  arrangement,  stated  in 
words,  suggests  incongruity ;  but  the  odd  thing 
is  that  La  Farge,  through  the  sheer  force  of 
his  individuality,  completely  harmonizes  his 
so  different  styles,  and,  what  is  more,  he  does 
so  with  no  concealment  of  his  Italian  and  Ori- 
ental sanctions.  Apprehending  the  thing  as  a 
whole  you  recognize  simply  his  creative  fac- 
ulty. It  is  only  when  you  coldly  analyze  it  that 
you  see  what  inspirations  he  has  borrowed  — 
and  then  you  reflect  on  the  rare  intuition  which 
led  him  to  borrow  those  two  elements  of  style 
and  no  others. 

Formality,  which  was  with  him  a  steadying 
force,  operating  from  the  back  of  his  mind  and 


C  ^ 

never  employed  for  its  own  sake,  entered  into 
his  glass  in  such  wise  that  while  you  knew  it 
to  be  indispensable  there  you  scarce  recog- 
nized its  presence.  His  arabesques  were  not 
the  dull,  insensate  devisings  of  a  stodgy  geo- 
metrician. They  were  like  the  pure  and  beau- 
tiful touches  of  decoration  placed  sparingly 
upon  his  building  by  a  Greek  architect,  or  like 
the  nominally  negligible  cusp,  lovingly  carved 
by  the  mediaeval  stonemason  on  the  spire  of 
a  cathedral.  They  were  little  knots  of  form, 
meant  to  hold  color  in  solution;  cunningly 
wrought  webs  in  which  to  imprison  light. 
There  are  many  of  La  Farge's  windows  which 
therefore  seem  to  be  but  curtains  of  jewels 
hung  between  us  and  the  light,  pieces  of  some 
new  kind  of  luminous  tapestry.  The  designs 
very  often  are  dominated  by  this  merely  sensu- 
ous spirit;  but  in  many  more  La  Farge  showed 
his  old  love  for  the  beauty  of  flowers,  and  in 
others  he  used  the  figure  as  freely  as  in  mural 
painting,  and,  on  occasion,  even  more  auda- 
ciously. Courage,  indeed,  was  one  of  his  inborn 
traits,  and  in  his  work  he  was  ever  ready  to 
press  a  resource  as  far  as  he  could  make  it  go. 
In  glass  he  felt  that  the  possibilities  were  illim- 
itable, and,  great  as  his  achievements  were, 
he  dreamed  of  still  more  daring  things. 


C  198  ] 

When  he  set  down  his  recollections  of 
Clarence  King  for  the  book  framed  by  the 
Century  Club  in  honor  of  that  other  man  of 
genius,  he  described  the  astounding  project 
that  King  talked  over  with  him  when  the 
tomb  of  General  Grant  was  under  considera- 
tion. "Our  notion/'  he  wrote,  "was  to  have 
filled  the  drum  or  perhaps  even  the  curves  of 
the  dome  with  the  richest  and  deepest  of 
figured  glass,  built,  if  I  may  so  express  it,  into 
the  walls  of  the  structure,  and  not  a  mere  fit- 
ting in  as  windows.  .  .  .  This  imaginary  tower 
would  then  have  been  like  the  glory  of  the  in- 
terior of  a  great  jewel  in  the  day,  but  at  night 
would  have  sent  out  a  far  radiance  over  the 
entire  city,  making  as  it  were  a  pharos,  a 
light-house,  to  be  seen  from  afar  by  night,  as 
well  as  by  day,  and  dominating  the  river  as 
well  as  the  land.  Of  course  this  was  too  poetic 
and  ideal  a  structure  to  be  accepted  at  the  date 
we  proposed  it."  It  was  not  too  poetic  an  ideal 
for  La  Farge,  nor  would  it  have  been  too  diffi- 
cult, too  monumental  a  scheme,  for  him  to 
have  carried  out.  On  the  contrary,  as  I  have 
said,  in  glass  nothing  could  balk  him  and  the 
larger  the  opportunity  the  more  royally  he 
ruled  it.  It  was  as  though  glass  put  under  his 


C  ^9  ] 

hand  an  orchestral  body  which  no  one  else 
could  drive.  His  notes  of  color  pealed  forth  in 
clarion  tones,  they  sank  to  the  mellow  mur- 
murings  of  the  wood- wind,  they  rose  to  the 
piercing  assertiveness  of  the  strings,  and  then, 
again,  they  were  fused  in  veritably  sea-like 
waves  of  power  and  deep,  mysterious  beauty. 
He  put  ideas  into  his  windows  as  he  put  them 
into  everything  that  he  did,  true  religious 
emotion  in  the  countless  designs  that  he  made 
for  churches,  and  an  infinite  variety  of  deco- 
rative arrangements  of  form  in  those  pro- 
duced for  secular  buildings.  But  out  of  the 
great  mass  of  his  work  in  glass  the  master- 
piece which  I  would  signalize  as  most  com- 
pletely representative  is  the  famous  Peacock 
window,  now  preserved  in  the  art  museum  at 
Worcester. 

This  window  occupies  a  place  apart.  It  is, 
indeed,  something  more  than  a  window,  and 
in  that  fact  lies  its  exceptional  interest.  We 
are  ruled  by  routine.  It  is  the  mission  of  the 
painter  to  paint;  the  sculptor  is  expected  to 
abide  by  the  rules  of  plastic  art,  and,  of  course, 
it  is  obviously  desirable  that  both  artists 
should  avoid  hybrid  methods.  But  is  it  equally 
certain  that  the  man  who  works  in  glass 


[   200  ] 

should  only  make  windows;  that  his  art 
should  be  governed  by  a  purpose  half  utili- 
tarian and  half  decorative?  Is  there  any  reason 
why  a  design  executed  in  this  medium  should 
not  exist  in  and  for  itself?  La  Farge  answered 
the  question  by  producing  a  great  work  of 
art  for  no  other  reason  than  that  he  got  end- 
less pleasure  out  of  the  manipulation  of  its 
materials. 

The  window — since,  for  convenience,  we 
must  use  the  term  —  is  an  upright  panel  of 
modest  dimensions,  perhaps  forty  inches  high 
and  a  little  less  than  half  as  wide.  Filling  a 
good  part  of  the  space  is  a  peacock  of  glorious 
plumage.  The  head  and  body  are  well  up  in 
the  higher  zone  of  the  composition,  so  that 
the  colors  of  the  back  and  of  the  tail  feath- 
ers seem  to  flow  as  in  an  iridescent  waterfall 
down  toward  the  watery  green  background 
at  the  bottom.  This  background,  which  has  a 
fairly  light  tone  at  the  base  of  the  design, 
deepens  gradually  as  it  ascends  through  gra- 
dations of  dark  blues  and  dark  purples.  Here 
and  there,  on  either  side  of  the  bird,  there  is 
a  mass  of  rosy  but  quiet  color.  These  episodes 
are  provided  by  the  big  peonies  which  the 
artist  chose  for  his  floral  motive.  Their  lovely 


C   201  ] 

hues  are  made  the  lovelier  through  contrast 
with  dark  leafage.  Set  within  these  broader 
elements  of  color  is  the  proud  blaze  of  the 
peacock's  feathers.  They  make  actually  a 
kind  of  conflagration  and  yet  this  work  is  in 
nothing  more  artistic  than  in  its  fusion  of  un- 
numbered glowing  tints  into  a  positively  re- 
poseful harmony.  It  is  as  if  La  Farge  had 
taken  a  thousand  precious  stones  and  then 
filtered  the  sunlight  through  them,  but  had 
always  remembered  so  to  arrange  his  jewels, 
so  to  blend  or  contrast  them,  that  in  the  en- 
semble they  should  preserve  something  of  the 
subtle,  sober  unity  which  you  find  in  divers 
nominally  " gorgeous"  things,  such  as  Ori- 
ental rugs,  the  arabesques  of  the  Alhambra, 
or  ordinary  fireworks.  In  other  words,  this 
is  the  very  poetry  of  stained  glass,  a  vision  of 
sensuous  loveliness  realized  in  a  medium  no- 
toriously obstinate  but  made  to  serve  the  de- 
signer's purpose  as  readily  as  pigment  serves 
it. 

I  make  the  allusion  to  pigment,  however, 
for  the  very  reason  that  we  must  here  dis- 
tinguish between  the  two  mediums.  The  Pea- 
cock Window  is  not  a  picture,  an  attempt  to 
do  in  glass  what  one  might  do  in  paint,  an 


C  202  n 

attempt  at  translation.  On  the  contrary,  its 
great  virtue  lies  in  the  fact  that  it  has  the 
character  only  to  be  extorted  from  glass;  it 
expresses  the  very  genius  of  a  medium.  You 
feel  this  on  looking  closely  into  its  textures. 
You  see  how  that  marvellous  background 
possesses  just  the  depth  and  transparency 
which  lie  beyond  the  reach  of  the  brush.  You 
see  how  the  form  of  the  peacock  is  defined  in 
what  I  must  call  "strokes"  but  that  these 
have  a  special  character,  and  are  not,  for  ex- 
ample, the  equivalents  of  brush-work;  they 
denote  the  technique  of  glass  and  of  glass 
alone.  You  see  how  the  thin  threads  of  metal 
play  a  part  of  their  own,  an  indispensable 
part,  toward  the  unfolding  of  the  charm  of  the 
whole.  You  see,  finally,  how  it  was  only  with 
glass  that  La  Farge  could  gain  the  strength 
lent  by  one  touch  of  flaming  ruby  amid  his 
hues  of  emerald,  sapphire  and  topaz,  or,  with 
tiny  apertures  at  a  hundred  points,  allow  the 
light  to  sift  through  like  so  much  diamond 
dust.  It  is  the  kind  of  work  to  stir  a  painter's 
soul  and  make  him  wish  to  turn  from  his 
familiar  occupation  to  experiment  in  glass. 
Only,  in  making  the  transition,  he  would  have 
clearly  to  recognize  the  fact  that  he  had  come 


C  203  3 

to  woo  a  totally  new  muse,  that  while  his  ex- 
perience as  a  painter  might  help  him  he  would 
have  to  render  allegiance  to  glass  as  glass, 
and  observe  the  full  rigor  of  the  game. 

That  La  Farge  could  do  this  is  one  expla- 
nation of  his  preeminence  in  glass,  and  with 
the  thought  there  must  come,  I  think,  an  im- 
pulse of  admiration,  passing  into  reverence, 
for  the  genius  and  the  largeness  of  soul  which 
fitted  him  to  conquer  so  vast  an  area  in  the 
domain  of  art.  I  have  spoken  of  his  passion  for 
work  and  the  store  of  energy  upon  which  he 
valiantly  drew,  impatient  of  the  claims  of 
health.  "For  a  sick  man  I  write  too  much," 
concludes  one  of  the  letters  quoted  in  this  vol- 
ume. For  a  sick  man  he  did  too  much  in  every 
direction.  Nevertheless  it  is  not  solely  upon 
the  scale  and  duration  of  his  physical  effort, 
perhaps  unique  in  modern  times,  that  the  stu- 
dent of  his  career  is  moved  to  reflect,  nor  upon 
his  unquenchable  enthusiasm,  beautiful  as  that 
was.  The  outstanding  trait  of  La  Farge  is,  of 
course,  the  sheer  breadth  and  richness  of  his 
scope.  Versatility  is  a  poor  word  to  apply  to 
a  man  of  his  gifts.  It  connotes,  ordinarily,  a 
smaller  type,  a  type  of  powers  more  lightly 
exercised  and  suffering  thereby  a  certain  wan- 


[  2°4  H 

ton  diffusion  of  their  inner  spark.  La  Farge 
met  the  temptation  to  wreak  himself  on  com- 
paratively minor  issues  and  did  not  always 
resist  it.  When  he  was  working  in  the  Van- 
derbilt  house  and  making,  in  the  glass  for  it, 
some  of  his  most  important  designs,  he  took 
the  creation  of  embroideries  there  under  his 
care  and  gave  his  attention  also  to  some  of  the 
woodwork,  as  he  did  in  the  development  of 
his  decorative  scheme  in  St.  Thomas's  Church. 
Years  ago,  too,  he  deviated  briefly  into  sculp- 
ture, designing  a  monument,  including  a  ped- 
estal with  steps  and  a  cross,  which  stands  in 
the  cemetery  at  Newport.  But  mainly,  when 
he  required  passages  of  plastic  art  in  his  work, 
as  at  St.  Thomas's  and  in  the  Vanderbilt  house, 
he  made  the  designs  and  then  called  in  Saint- 
Gaudens  to  be  his  collaborator. 

In  the  arts  to  which  he  unreservedly  gave 
himself  at  one  stage  or  another  of  his  career 
he  saw  his  inspiration  steadily  and  he  saw  it 
whole.  You  observe  the  landscapes,  flower 
studies  and  figure  pieces  of  his  early  period, 
the  oils,  water  colors  and  drawings;  you 
reckon  up  the  paintings  of  his  maturity,  the 
Eastern  and  South  Sea  pictures  and  sketches, 
and  the  great  mural  decorations ;  and  you  add 


C  205  ] 

to  these  the  stupendous  succession  of  his  works 
in  glass.  Beneath  the  surface  of  it  all  you  per- 
ceive a  proud  and  strong  spirit  holding  undis- 
tracted  to  its  course,  knowing  its  own  mind, 
confident  of  its  high  authority  received  as 
through  a  laying  on  of  hands,  and,  as  in  the 
ancient  days,  leaving  behind  it  an  indelible 
mark.  His  multifarious  activities  are  strangely 
unified  by  his  intrinsic  greatness. 


VII 


THE  OLD  MASTER 

WISDOM  was  the  capstone  of  his  career, 
the  fruition  of  his  long  labors  —  wis- 
dom, and  a  clairvoyance  which  made  him  free 
of  all  the  real  things.  If  this  were  a  formal  bio- 
graphy I  suppose  I  would  occupy  myself  in 
reciting  quantities  of  external  incidents, — the 
commissions  given  to  La  Farge,  the  medals 
won,  the  degrees  conferred  upon  him  by 
learned  institutions,  and  all  the  other  miscel- 
laneous details  of  a  long  life.  But  this  is  not  a 
formal  biography.  What  I  have  endeavored 
to  do  has  been  simply  to  portray  the  La  Farge 
I  knew,  a  personality,  a  mind,  an  artistic  force. 
It  is  for  this  reason  also  that  I  have  refrained 
from  the  analysis  of  scores  of  works  of  his, 
very  familiar  to  me  and  full  of  material  tempt- 
ing to  discuss.  In  any  case  the  recording  and 
describing  of  all  of  a  man's  productions  is  a 
doubtful  enterprise,  far  more  doubtful  than  we 
are  wont  to  think,  with  our  modern  infatuation 
for  what  we  are  pleased  to  regard  as  historical 
completeness.  It  is  the  notion  that  to  be  criti- 


John  La  Farge  in  1902 


C  207  ] 

cally  exhaustive  we  must  count  all  the  leaves 
on  the  tree  that  explains  the  frequent  preser- 
vation of  stuff  which  a  great  artist  would  de- 
stroy if  he  knew  the  moment  in  which  he  was 
to  die.  It  has  been  responsible,  too,  for  the 
transformation  of  many  a  biography  into  a 
wearisome  catalogue. 

The  greatest  of  artists  has  his  lapses  and  his 
longueurs,  not  moments  merely  but  days  in 
which  inspiration  fails  and  something  like 
gaucherie  descends  upon  him.  La  Farge  him- 
self has  said  that  hero  worship  is  not  the  best 
key  to  understanding.  True  appreciation  of 
Whistler,  for  example,  has  been  seriously  ar- 
rested in  many  quarters  by  the  ululations  of 
the  fanatics  who  would  have  it  that  every 
touch  of  a  master's  hand  is  priceless.  Some- 
times it  is  almost  valueless,  being  without 
nervous  force  or  purpose.  La  Farge  knew 
well  enough  that  a  work  of  art  is  not  to  be 
measured  by  a  foot  rule  and  then  to  be  sum- 
marily dismissed  as  good  or  bad.  He  knew  also 
the  weight  and  profound  truth  of  that  saying 
of  Keats :  "  When  I  feel  I  am  right,  no  exter- 
nal praise  can  give  me  such  a  glow  as  my  own 
solitary  reperception  and  ratification  of  what 
is  fine."  Writing  to  me  of  a  new  window  that 


C  208  ] 

he  had  completed,  and  that  "  in  the  shop  looks 
handsome/'  La  Farge  goes  on  to  say:  "It  is 
of  a  novel  idea,  I  think,  and  a  new  treatment 
— in  our  part  of  work  —  but  the  main  point  is 
that  I  like  it"  The  italics  are  mine.  I  use  them 
as  a  reminder  of  what  it  is  always  important 
to  look  for  in  his,  or  in  any  artist's  work — 
what  he  intended  and  achieved,  not  what  we 
think  he  ought  to  have  done.  But  it  is  with  a 
sense  of  La  Farge's  own  outlook  upon  ques- 
tions of  this  sort  that  I  have  refused  to  write 
of  him  as  of  a  demigod.  I  should  be  sorry  if 
from  any  of  the  foregoing  chapters  the  reader 
had  surmised  that  I  wished  to  paint  him  as  im- 
peccable and  possessed  of  the  unanswerable 
authority  of  a  force  of  nature.  No  man  of  ge- 
nius that  ever  wielded  a  brush  has  been  so 
fearful  a  wildfowl  as  all  that. 

It  is  enough  if  we  recognize  that  La  Farge 
at  his  best  produced  certain  works  of  art  of  a 
gem-like  perfection.  The  "Paradise  Valley" 
is  one  of  these  and  there  are  other  landscapes, 
dating  from  the  same  period,  which  I  would 
rank  with  it.  Many  of  his  flower  paintings  and 
figure  pieces  are  on  the  same  plane.  The 
"Ascension,"  amongst  his  mural  decorations, 
and  the  "Peacock  Window"  in  the  field  of 


C  209  ] 

glass,  are  there  to  illustrate  again  the  con- 
summate master.  But  the  whole  trend  of  my 
study  has  been  toward  the  exposition  of  his 
essential  greatness  as  an  artist  and  I  need  not 
labor  the  point.  What  is  necessary  to  the  fuller 
realization  of  his  character,  the  closer  grasp 
of  the  special  quality  of  his  genius,  is  a  sense 
of  that  complexity  on  which  we  cannot  too 
often  pause,  that  dependence  of  his  upon 
mental  and  spiritual  mood,  that  protean  habit 
which,  if  it  prevented  him  from  invariably 
striking  twelve,  made  every  movement  of  his 
forces  an  affair  of  subtly  personalized  interest. 
He  was  not  the  painter  to  brood  over  a  work 
in  every  instance  until  he  left  it  an  example 
of  rounded  perfection,  then  going  on  to  ab- 
sorption in  a  similar  task,  so  that  his  life  was 
a  succession  of  so  many  flawless  milestones. 
He  took  things  in  his  stride.  He  never  scamped 
anything;  but  there  was  always  a  tremendous 
ferment  going  on  in  his  brain,  he  was  always 
interested  in  many  things  and  subject  to  gusts 
and  jets  of  emotion  and  curiosity.  Hence,  in 
the  vast  body  of  his  work,  the  presence  of 
quantities  of  things  which,  from  the  point  of 
view  of  the  schoolmaster  distributing  marks 
of  merit  and  demerit,  are  not,  strictly  speak- 


C  210  1 

ing,  masterpieces,  but  which  have  his  quality 
in  them,  and,  above  all,  are  intensely  original. 
I  cannot  lay  too  heavy  a  stress  upon  the  ab- 
sence from  his  work  of  traits  linking  him,  as 
an  imitator,  with  any  masters  or  schools  of  the 
past.  In  his  own  time  he  had  only  two  paral- 
lels, Watts  and  Moreau,  and  he  was  more 
purely  the  artist  than  either  of  them.  Like 
Tintoretto,  who  sought  to  blend  the  color  of 
Titian  with  the  form  of  Michael  Angelo,  the 
English  artist  deliberately  sat  down  to  con- 
scious emulation.  He  paid  the  penalty  in  a  cer- 
tain exaggerated  subjection  to  tradition.  Also 
there  was  forever  lurking  in  him  a  Tolstoyan 
ambiguity  as  to  where  the  claims  of  art  and 
those  of  morals  were  to  be  differentiated.  La 
Farge  never  fell  into  either  mistake.  He  began 
without  formulas  and  with  a  distrust  of  their 
efficacy;  he  ended  in  the  same  mood  of  de- 
tachment from  them,  with  the  same  distrust. 
Though  tradition  and  morals  were  both  ever 
present  in  his  conception  of  life  and  of  art  he 
kept  each  in  its  place.  He  thought  too  accu- 
rately to  be  misled  in  these  matters,  and  on  the 
side  of  technique,  which  is  so  closely  allied  to 
them  in  the  genius  of  a  man  of  mind,  he  knew 
too  well  just  what  he  was  about.  It  is  amusing 


C  211  3 

to  compare  him  with  Moreau.  In  the  sphere 
of  imagination  there  was  a  tie  of  sympathy 
between  them,  but  where  the  Frenchman 
missed  the  beauty  of  painted  surface  in  spite 
of  striving  for  it,  he,  as  I  have  shown  in  an 
earlier  chapter,  got  it  easily  enough  when  he 
tried  for  it.  When  we  miss  it  in  his  later  period 
we  recognize  a  renunciation,  not  a  depriva- 
tion. 

I  must  speak  again  of  his  mixed  feeling  on 
this  point.  At  times  he  would  regard  his  de- 
tachment from  the  manipulation  of  pigment 
and  the  "  bloom  "  to  which  I  have  alluded,  as 
a  regrettable  sacrifice  imposed  by  hard  cir- 
cumstance. In  the  reminiscences  he  wrote  for 
me  there  is  a  passage  almost  plaintively  ex- 
pressing this  point  of  view.  Referring  to  his 
decorative  work,  he  says,  "  In  all  this  there  is 
a  good  deal  of  fun,  but  I  still  regret  that  I 
gave  up  the  art  of  painting,  for  which  I  had, 
evidently,  quite  a  talent  and  for  which  I  had 
made  very  serious  studies,  many  far  in  ad- 
vance of  the  people  of  my  day."  Neverthe- 
less, as  he  constantly  made  plain  to  me,  he 
did  not  exaggerate  the  significance  of  the  art 
of  painting  as  it  was  illustrated  in  his  earlier 
manner.  He  simply  recognized  the  fact  that 


there  are  kinds  of  painting.  It  is  hard,  as  I  have 
shown,  for  many  modern  artists  to  seize  this 
truth.  It  was  simple  enough  for  La  Farge,  with 
his  capacity  for  infinite  degrees  of  adjustment. 
Simple  enough  for  him,  I  say,  yet  for  the  bi- 
ographer, striving  to  trace  the  windings  of  his 
thought,  the  reasoning  by  which  he  arrived  at 
his  resolutions  and  reconciled  all  the  warring 
impulses  met  on  the  way,  every  stage  of  ana- 
lysis involves  new  obstacles.  Years  of  inti- 
macy with  La  Farge  could  not  make  him  less 
baffling,  less  elusive.  In  the  first  chapter  of 
this  book  I  have  quoted  the  remarkable  analy- 
sis of  his  genius  by  his  old  friend  and  travel- 
ling companion,  Henry  Adams.  Here,  from  a 
private  letter,  are  some  further  passages  from 
the  same  hand :  — 

"I  am  such  a  matter-of-fact  sort  of  person 
that  I  never  could  try  to  approach  La  Farge 
from  his  own  side.  He  had  to  come  over  to 
mine.  Yet  he,  like  most  considerable  artists, 
worked  so  much  more  intuitively  than  intel- 
lectually that  he  could  not  have  taught  me 
much,  had  he  tried ;  because  I  could  only  work 
intellectually.  For  that  reason  I  thought  I 
could  follow  him  best  in  his  glass,  where  his 
effects  were  strong  and  broad.  Although  I 


[  213  ] 

thought  him  quite  the  superior  of  any  other 
artist  I  ever  met,  —  and  I  have  no  special  rea- 
son for  limiting  the  remark  to  artists  alone,  — 
he  was  so  '  un-American,'  —  so  remote  from 
me  in  time  and  mind,  —  and  above  all,  so  un- 
intelligible to  himself  as  well  as  to  me,  that  I 
have  preferred  to  talk  little  about  him,  in  de- 
spair of  making  him  or  his  art  intelligible  to 
Americans ;  but  if  I  did  try  to  do  it,  I  would 
rather  try  by  putting  some  of  his  glass  side 
by  side  with  that  of  other  centuries  back  to 
the  twelfth.  Perhaps,  by  that  means,  he  might 
become  intelligible. 

"  He  was  a  marvel  to  me  in  his  contradic- 
tions. Unlike  most  men  of  genius  he  had  no 
vices  that  I  could  detect.  He  had  one  of  the 
most  perfectly  balanced  judgments  that  could 
ever  exist.  Towards  me,  he  seemed  always 
even-tempered  to  an  inconceivable  degree.  I 
do  not  mean  benevolent,  or  sentimental,  or 
commonplace,  but  just  even,  and  in  his  disap- 
proval as  well  as  in  his  acceptance.  Of  course 
he  was  often  severe,  but  his  severity  itself  was 
shaded  and  toned.  Yet  he  was  not  easy  to  live 
with,  thus  contradicting  even  his  contradic- 
tions. 

"The  task  of  painting  him  is  so  difficult  as 


[  214  ] 

to  scare  any  literary  artist  out  of  his  wits.  The 
thing  cannot  be  done.  It  is  like  the  attempt  of 
the  nineteenth-century  writers  to  describe  a 
sunset  in  colors.  Complexity  cannot  be  handled 
in  print  to  that  degree.  La  Farge  used  to  de- 
ride his  own  attempts  to  paint  sea  and  sky  and 
shadow  in  the  South  Seas,  and  was  rather  fond 
of  pointing  out  how,  at  a  certain  point  of  de- 
velopment, he  always  failed,  and  spoiled  his 
picture.  At  a  certain  point  of  development,  the 
literary  artist  is  bound  to  fail  still  more  because 
he  has  not  even  color  to  help  him,  and  mere 
words  only  call  attention  to  the  fact  that  the 
attempt  to  give  them  color  is  a  predestined 
failure.  In  the  portrait  of  La  Farge  you  must 
get  not  only  color,  but  also  constant  change 
and  shifting  of  light,  as  in  opals  and  moon- 
stones and  star-sapphires,  where  the  light  is  in 
the  object.  You  need  to  write  as  an  artist,  for 
artists,  because  the  highest-educated  man  or 
woman  of  the  world  cannot  comprehend  you, 
if  you  qualify  and  refine,  as  La  Farge  did,  and 
then  contradict  your  own  refinements  by  fling- 
ing great  masses  of  pure  force  in  your  readers' 
faces,  as  he  did  in  his  windows." 

The  hope  that  lures  one  on  in  this  struggle 
to  qualify  and  refine,  to  find  unity  in  com- 


C  215  H 

plexity,  is  a  hope  that  sustains  the  student 
of  every  great  character.  Most  men  of  emi- 
nence leave  behind  them  the  memory  of  a 
controlling  principle,  visible  like  some  still, 
central  flame,  shining  through  the  bulk  of 
their  achievement.  Call  it  what  you  will,  — 
the  ruling  passion,  the  influence  of  an  environ- 
ment, the  force  of  an  idea, — you  know  the 
man  for  a  type,  and,  no  matter  how  averse  you 
may  be  from  classifying  genius,  you  inevit- 
ably because  instinctively  give  it  its  label.  The 
mere  convenience  we  automatically  seek  in 
our  mental  transactions  leads  us  to  put  a  great 
man  in  his  group,  to  think  of  him  under  a  given 
head  in  the  history  of  human  endeavor.  This 
one,  we  say,  was  constructive;  that  one  was 
an  agent  of  broad  imaginative  inspiration ;  an- 
other we  call  a  moral  aid,  and  still  another  is 
a  voice  of  doubt.  The  list  of  tags  is  endless,  but 
that  fact  does  not  discourage  our  use  of  tags. 
I  use  the  expression,  of  course,  in  no  narrow 
sense,  but  as  it  applies  in  our  dealings  with 
even  the  greatest  men.  When  I  ask  myself, 
following  this  habit,  what  La  Farge  preemi- 
nently stood  for,  I  find  something  trivial  and 
misleading  in  the  association  of  his  genius  with 
anything  that  connotes  a  style,  a  school.  Into 


I  216  ] 

what  definitely  bounded  category  could  we 
force  the  artist  whose  character  I  have  attempt- 
ed to  analyze  ?  But  in  his  rejection  of  formulas 
there  lies,  I  think,  a  clue.  To  pursue,  as  far  as 
one  may,  the  secret  of  that  love  of  freedom  that 
moved  him  all  his  life  long,  is  to  approach 
what  I  believe  to  be  his  distinguishing  trait, 
the  one  giving  us  our  label — if  label  we  must 
have. 

La  Farge's  ruling  passion,  perceptible  as  we 
see  his  life  as  a  whole  and  perhaps  only  then 
—  though  it  is  revealed  by  flashes  in  his  talk 
and  writings  —  was  the  lust  of  knowledge.  He 
loved  knowledge  for  its  own  sake.  To  the 
thinking  man  knowledge  is  a  kind  of  sensation 
— it  is  tangible,  sensuous,  thrilling,  a  thing  as 
grateful  to  his  whole  being  as  is  the  sharp  salt 
savor  of  the  sea,  cold,  stinging,  and  ineffably 
delicious  when  it  is  breasted  naked  on  a  burn- 
ing day.  To  such  a  man  the  acquirement  of 
knowledge  is  an  affair  of  unceasing  zest  and 
pleasure.  And  to  such  a  man  this  perpetual 
hunt  through  the  world  of  thought  is  nothing 
if  not  disinterested;  it  means  nothing  if  it  does 
not  mean  the  development  in  his  soul  of  a  pro- 
found humility.  I  see  La  Farge  questioning, 
always  questioning,  but  never  suffering  disap- 


C  217  n 

pointment  because  the  solution  of  his  problem 
was  always  just  beyond  his  reach.  He  would 
have  been  disappointed,  in  a  sense,  if  he  could 
have  grasped  it.  That  would  have  spelled 
finality  and  would  have  taken  too  many  sur- 
prises, too  many  illusions,  out  of  life.  Hence, 
too,  the  liberality  of  his  judgments,  his  refusal 
to  regard  any  question  as  settled,  or  any  per- 
sonality, historic  or  in  his  own  time,  as  con- 
clusively understood  and  explained.  His  re- 
spect for  the  individuality  of  any  man,  great 
or  small,  lay  deep  and,  I  may  even  say,  had 
about  it  something  of  gentleness,  of  tender- 
ness. He  feared  to  misunderstand,  to  misjudge. 

There  was  always  the  other  side  of  the 
medal  to  be  accounted  for.  What  was  it  like  ? 
He  hungered  to  know.  But  to  get  the  know- 
ledge he  used  all  the  discretion  imaginable  and 
when  it  was  his  he  was  doubly  anxious  to  treat 
it  with  respect,  to  be  quite  sure.  The  new 
knowledge  did  not  round  out,  any  more  than 
it  cancelled,  the  old.  It  only  complicated  the 
original  question  —  and  thereby  made  it  the 
more  delightful.  He  was  a  Heracleitean.  He 
saw  life  in  a  flux  and  that  gave  it,  for  him,  its 
charm.  The  most  LaFargesque  saying  I  know 
occurs  in  a  letter  written  in  sickness  and  noting 


1 218  3 

how  an  invalid  necessarily  disturbs  all  the  peo- 
ple around  him.  "I  stood  as  well  as  I  could," 
he  says,  "the  annoyances  I  inflicted. "  In  that 
remark,  absolutely  accurate,  sincere,  and  char- 
acteristic, there  is  perfectly  mirrored  his  in- 
ability to  see  only  one  side  of  a  question,  his 
completely  disinterested  interest  in  both  sides 
of  it. 

He  was  so  accustomed  to  thinking  and  feel- 
ing in  this  way  that  in  spite  of  a  pretty  broad 
experience  of  human  nature  he  was  apt  to 
take  for  granted  the  same  elasticity  of  mind 
in  others.  Naturally  he  knew,  from  time  to 
time,  rather  startling  disillusionment.  This 
always  puzzled  and  grieved  him  a  little,  for  he 
deplored  what  seemed  to  him  a  violation  of  the 
proper  laws  of  thought,  and,  besides,  he  hated 
the  misunderstandings  so  often  promoted  by 
such  violation.  Misunderstanding  leads  to 
anger  and  bitterness.  La  Farge  was  not  a 
quarrelsome  man  and  he  deprecated  these 
evils  as  he  would  have  deprecated  the  invasion 
of  his  studio  by  ugly  noises.  Moreover,  the 
importance  sometimes  attached  to  the  little 
troubles  of  life  outraged  his  sense  of  propor- 
tion. He  delighted  in  Cellini,  loving  best  of  all 
his  naturalness,  and  it  annoyed  him  that  peo- 


C  219  ] 

pie  often  got  excited  about  the  Italian's  truth 
or  falsehood.  Speaking  of  this,  one  night,  he 
tried  to  recall  some  "clever"  person  who  had 
been  guilty  of  the  unfairness,  and  then  said, 
with  a  laugh,  "  But  why  try  to  remember  stu- 
pid, unpleasant  things?"  For  one  thing,  he 
felt  that  such  remembrance  not  seldom  ended 
in  complete  misrepresentation.  It  amused  him 
to  reflect  on  the  manner  in  which  he  had  him- 
self occasionally  suffered  from  heedless  gossip, 
and  in  a  late  letter  he  asked  me :  — 

"Do  you  remember  the  old  story  — 
French  —  absolutely  true,  I  was  told,  in  the 
French  office  ?  An  employ^  finds  a  good  deal 
of  money  in  big  bills.  Brings  it  in  to  office.  Is 
thanked.  A  few  years  after,  is  mentioned  for 
advancement.  The  'Ministre'  in  charge  of 
office  says,  <  But  why?  I  remember  his  name. 
Was  he  not  implicated  in  an  affair  about  money 
found?  No  proof  against  him  —  perhaps?'  " 

He  told  me  that  story  apropos  of  another, 
which  had  been  told  about  himself,  one  pos- 
sibly familiar  to  some  of  my  readers,  for  a  man 
like  La  Farge  is  always  the  subject  of  anec- 
dotes handed  about.  It  had  to  do  with  an 
Oriental  rug  which  he  had  purchased  years 
ago  in  Boston,  at  a  time  when,  in  the  opinion 


[   220  ^ 

of  persons  having  nothing  whatever  to  do 
with  it  or  with  him,  the  purchase  was  immea- 
surably extravagant.  Well,  it  was  a  Mecca 
carpet  —  some  five  feet  square  —  for  which 
La  Farge  paid  the  sum  of  forty  dollars  !  And 
his  crime  consisted  in  buying  the  piece  from 
under  the  nose  of  some  one  else  who  wanted 
it.  Recollecting  the  insignificant  episode  with 
much  enjoyment  of  its  drollery,  he  wrote  me 
of  the  odd  connection  between  this  rug  and  a 
decorative  problem  which  he  had  to  carry  out 
at  the  time  in  consonance  with  certain  "de- 
nominational" principles  :  — 

"The  'motives '  of  it  are  on  the  ceiling  of 
the  Congregational  Church  in  Newport.  Now 
my  rug  had  struck  me  as  solving  the  problem 
of  the  ceiling  and  part  of  the  wall.  It  suggested 
some  of  the  earlier  Romanesque  in  cruciform 
patterns,  and  yet  was  evidently  not  a  <  Rom- 
ish' pattern.  I  dare  not  say  it  was  Mahom- 
medan.  So  you  see  the  careless,  spendthrift, 
bad  man  had  some  close  idea  of  business  du- 
ties in  his  wild  career." 

There  is  an  old  tale  about  the  great  Duke 
of  Wellington,  ruefully  murmuring  that  he 
was  "much  exposed  to  authors."  La  Farge 
was  much  exposed  to  committees.  I  think  he 


Waterfall  in  our  Garden  at  Nikko,  Japan 


C  221  3 

liked  them,  or  at  any  rate  that  they  had  for 
him  a  kind  of  dark  fascination,  as  of  august 
bodies  whose  terribilita  might  at  any  moment 
drift  into  an  amusing  phase.  There  is,  to  be 
sure,  something  about  committees  that  is  not 
wholly  solemn.  From  the  member  of  shrink- 
ing modesty,  who  knows  nothing  about  art  but 
"knows  what  he  likes,"  to  the  member  who 
does  n't  know  even  that,  and  is  accordingly, 
like  Habakkuk,  capable  de  tout,  they  are  all, 
in  the  nature  of  things,  possessed  of  a  demon. 
I  do  not  recall  if  in  that  amusing  book  of  M. 
Le  Bon's  on  "  The  Psychology  of  the  Crowd," 
which  I  read  long  ago,  there  is  a  chapter  on 
committees,  but  if  there  is  one  it  must  account 
for  their  ways  on  mystic  grounds.  No  doubt 
committees,  and  individuals,  occasionally 
thought  that  they  had  reason  to  be  vexed  with 
La  Farge.  There  is,  of  course,  something 
heinous  in  an  artist's  failure  to  finish  and  de- 
liver a  piece  of  work,  according  to  contract, 
on  a  given  Wednesday  afternoon  at  half  past 
two.  But  sometimes  one  wearies  of  the  hy- 
pothesis that  the  business  man  is  the  only  re- 
spectable type  in  an  imperfect  world,  whose 
orderliness,  punctuality,  solvency,  and  unas- 
sailable rectitude  must  excite  our  blind  vene- 


C  222  3 

ration.  For  my  own  part,  over  the  anguish  of 
the  owners  of  those  Brahminical  toes  on  which 
La  Farge  may  have  reposed  himself  from 
time  to  time,  I  cannot  weep  salt  tears.  On  the 
contrary,  I  contemplate  it  with  that  emotion 
sanctioned  in  one  of  La  Rochefoucauld's  best 
remembered  maxims.  After  all,  a  great  artist 
is  not  necessarily  supplied  with  all  the  virtues 
of  a  stockbroker  or  a  manufacturer.  And  to 
any  one  who  really  knew  La  Farge  it  was 
plain  that  he  longed  to  keep  his  affairs  in  apple- 
pie  order.  It  was  not  easy  to  do  this,  with  his 
ill-health  and  with  the  mountains  of  work  that 
he  had  to  get  through,  but  his  good  faith  was 
inextinguishable,  as  was  his  desire  to  meet  the 
wishes  of  those  with  whom  he  had  dealings 
and  to  share  with  them  the  sweets  of  good- 
will. We  used  often  to  talk  about  his  adven- 
tures in  the  world  of  everyday  business,  where 
practical  considerations  rise  up  like  ravening 
wolves  in  the  path  of  the  artist  eager  to  realize 
his  dreams.  Writing  to  me  on  this  subject  he 
once  said :  — 

"You  can  hardly  imagine  how  absurd  it  is 
to  realize  that  you  cannot  give  certain  extra 
folds  to  a  cloak  because  they  will  cost  so  many 
dollars  more,  or  that  an  extra  angel's  head  is 


worth  seventy-two  dollars  and  must  be  cut 
out,  or  one  of  its  hands  hidden  because  that  is 
five  dollars,  and  that  the  very  shape  of  the 
fold  is  a  matter  of  money.  So  that  which  of  the 
business  firms  of  England,  or,  indeed,  of  the 
United  States,  has  the  deepest  religious  senti- 
ment, I  do  not  know. 

«  Perhaps  you  will  remember  that  in  one 
of  my  lectures  at  the  Metropolitan  Museum  I 
recorded  how  some  good  women,  some  nuns, 
consulted  me  on  this  question.  I  advised  them 
to  take  the  young  man  with  the  prettiest  beard 
and  the  sweetest  cravat,  whom  I  think  they 
would  have  taken  anyhow.  This  is  funny  but 
it  is  absolutely  true.  The  same  good  ladies 
did  not  like  the  old  Italian  paintings,  from  A 
to  Z,  which  I  had  shown  them  to  get  an  idea 
of  what  they  liked  and  to  help  their  tastes  a 
little.  These  are  the  foundations  on  which  we 
build  for  Eternity." 

The  passage  is  good-natured.  LaFargehad 
exemplary  patience  with  the  difficult  condi- 
tions often  confronting  him.  He  knew  that 
Rome  was  not  built  in  a  day  and  he  was  slow 
to  complain.  Upon  a  memorable  occasion  he 
spoke  out  with  electrifying  effect.  When,  in 
January,  1909,  at  a  dinner  given  by  the 


C  22*  ] 

Architectural  League  of  New  York,  that  body 
bestowed  upon  him  its  medal  of  honor  for  the 
best  work  of  decorative  painting  shown  at  its 
exhibition  that  year,  he  remarked  in  his  speech 
of  acceptance  that  a  certain  firm  of  architects 
had  not,  for  twenty  years,  given  him  any  work 
to  do.  Of  course  this  made  a  sensation  in  the 
newspapers  of  the  next  morning  and  early  I 
received  a  hurried  note,  saying,  "Oh,  why 
were  you  not  at  the  dinner  of  the  League  last 
night?  'They '  had  the  most  stupid  account  in 
some  of  the  papers  of  what  I  may  have  said  — 
so  inaccurately  reported  as  to  make  me  seem 
to  attack  persons  and  things. "  He  was  cruelly 
distressed,  and  a  little  later  there  came  in 
the  Tribune  this  explanation  of  the  spirit  in 
which  he  had  spoken  :  — 

" 1  am  simply  voicing  my  regret  at  the  lack 
of  coordination  between  the  arts  —  between 
the  mural  painters  and  the  architects.  We 
were  all  friends  at  the  dinner  and  knew  each 
other  well.  As  for  my  statement  that  McKim, 
Mead  &  White  had  refused  to  give  me  any 
work,  that  was  based  on  something  the  late 
Stanford  White  said  to  me.  We  were  inti- 
mate friends ;  yet  he  remarked  to  me  once 
that  for  business  reasons  he  could  never  have 
me  do  any  work.  Why,  I  do  not  know. 


C  2«  3 

"As  for  the  medal  presented  to  me, when  I 
said  that  I  received  it  with  < some  reticence  of 
thanks/  I  meant  simply  that  I  was  getting  to 
that  time  of  life  when  such  things  meant  little. 
At  my  age  one  thinks  more  of  the  heaven  in 
<  Andrea  del  Sarto '  —  how  does  it  go  ?  well, 
never  mind  —  it's  fifty-two  years  since  I've 
read  it.  But  it  is  about  painting  within  the  four 
walls  of  heaven  with  Michael  Angelo  and  the 
others." 

The  incident  was  characteristic  of  La  Farge 
in  a  certain  innocent,  faun-like  mischievous- 
ness,  and  even  more  in  its  illustration  of  what 
I  have  already  touched  upon,  his  readiness  to 
assume  that  others  could  look,  as  he  could,  all 
around  a  subject.  There  was  no  malice  in  that 
outburst  of  his  and  I  may  appositely  recall 
the  fact  that  when  McKim  died  he  placed  in 
my  hands,  to  publish  in  the  Tribune,  a  long  let- 
ter on  the  architect  full  of  loyalty  and  the  most 
affectionate  appreciation.  Misunderstanding 
and  ill-feeling  were,  I  must  say  once  more, 
hateful  to  him.  I  remember  that  when  the 
Society  of  American  Artists  was  to  go  back 
into  the  fold  of  the  Academy  of  Design  he 
asked  me  to  come  to  the  dinner  with  which 
the  event  was  to  be  celebrated,  and  expressed 


his  fear  of  there  being  any  ill-timed  com- 
ment on  the  subject  anywhere.  Fearful  that 
the  newspapers  might  not  be  entirely  sym- 
pathetic in  their  reports  of  the  occasion,  he 
said  to  me:  "We  can't  have  anything  too 
quiet,  even  to  the  extent  of  there  being  no- 
thing. This  is  all  the  more  because  many  of 
our  younger  people  would  like  to  have  heads 
broken  and  a  general  scrimmage,  and  what 
for  I  don't  know."  It  might  seem,  perhaps, 
irrelevant  to  speak  of  these  trifles  that  have 
gone  down  the  wind,  but  La  Farge  was  a  man 
of  genius,  and  in  consequence  people  some- 
times found  him  "  difficult/ '  I  like  therefore 
to  show  how  really  lovable  he  was  and  how 
careful  at  bottom  for  the  interests  and  feel- 
ings of  others.  In  all  our  long  friendship  I 
never  once  knew  him  to  be  unfair  or  un- 
kind. To  me  he  seemed  always  as  he  seemed 
to  Mr.  Adams,  "  even-tempered  to  an  incon- 
ceivable degree.' '  One  more  testimony  to  the 
fineness  of  his  spirit  I  wish  to  cite,  for  I  know 
that  it  gave  him  deep  pleasure.  The  great 
decoration  in  the  Church  of  the  Ascension 
suffered  delay  in  being  carried  to  comple- 
tion. Something  of  what  he  told  me  about  it  I 
have  set  down  earlier  in  my  narrative,  and,  in- 


C  227  3 

deed,  it  is  unnecessary  to  traverse  the  subject 
in  detail.  There  were  stories  again,  like  that 
about  the  rug,  only  in  this  case  they  showed 
him  as  sorely  trying  the  patience  of  his  com- 
mittee. They  wounded  him,  for  they  were  un- 
deserved, and  the  late  Dr.  E.W.  Donald,  who 
had  been  Rector  of  the  Church  of  the  Ascen- 
sion when  the  work  was  done,  wrote  to  him  a 
letter  from  which  I  take  the  following :  — 

"  Perhaps  you  won't  be  sorry  to  have  me 
say  in  black  and  white  that  in  all  the  dealings 
I  have  had  with  you  (and  as  I  look  back  upon 
them  they  have  been  many  and  important) 
there  has  been  absolutely  nothing  that  could 
by  even  a  wicked  ingenuity  be  twisted  into  the 
semblance  of  anything  other  than  honorable 
dealing.  To  be  sure,  my  lay  ignorance  of  the 
ways  in  which  an  artist  works  has  made  it 
possible  for  me  to  be  exasperated  at  delays, 
but  completion  of  the  work  has  invariably 
wholly  removed  exasperation,  because,  after 
completion,  even  I  could  recognize  that  delay 
meant  the  enhancement  of  the  artistic  value 
of  the  work.  Indeed,  as  I  look  back  upon  the 
years  in  which  you  were  at  work  upon  the 
great  painting  in  the  Ascension,  and  shame- 
facedly recall  my  clumsy  and  perhaps  brutal 


[   228  ] 

attempts  to  hurry  you,  I  am  filled  with  con- 
trition. The  soiled  and  ragged  and  crumpled 
curtain  has  long  since  vanished  from  my  mem- 
ory, and  the  great  painting  alone  occupies  the 
field  of  view.  Perhaps,  you,  too,  as  you  look 
back  upon  our  relation  have  found  it  possible 
to  forgive  the  pragmatic  priest  for  his  unrea- 
sonableness, recognizing  that  it  was  due,  not 
to  personal  animosity,  but  to  crass  ignorance 
of  the  artist's  life.  At  all  events,  as  I  think  to- 
day of  our  coming  window  in  Trinity,  I  find 
myself  entirely  able  to  wait  with  exemplary 
patience  for  its  coming,  knowing  that  delay 
means  greater  beauty  in  the  glass.  How  much 
more  reasonable  we  grow  about  big  things  as 
we  advance  in  age !  How  much  more  space  in 
one's  life  the  heart  occupies  !  I  frankly  confess 
that  with  each  year  I  find,  alongside  of  my  ever 
increasing  admiration  for  your  work  as  an  art- 
ist, a  corresponding  increase  of  affection  for  you 
as  a  man  and  friend ;  so  that  to-day,  instead  of 
looking  upon  you,  as  years  ago  I  used  to,  solely 
as  the  great  artist  who  makes  our  churches 
beautiful,  I  now  think  of  you  as  the  friend  of 
my  youth  and  of  my  manhood,  to  whom  I  owe 
much,  apart  from  the  debt  your  artistic  work 
lays  me  under/ ' 


[   229  ] 

There  were  many  who  owed  him  much,  es- 
pecially amongst  the  artists  of  his  time.  Some 
of  them  he  taught,  but  it  is  not  so  much  the 
training  that  he  gave  his  pupils  and  assistants 
that  I  would  emphasize.  It  is,  rather,  the  broad 
stimulus  that  he  added  to  their  lives,  the  spur 
they  got  from  him,  apart  from  mere  questions 
of  technique.  Many  years  ago  Saint-Gaudens 
worked  with  him,  on  the  sculptural  part  of  the 
decoration  at  St.  Thomas's  Church,  and  only 
death  terminated  their  friendship.  In  the  fall 
of  1903  the  sculptor  wrote  to  him  and  in  the 
course  of  his  letter  said:  "Later  on  I  picked 
up  'McClure's,'  where  your  articles  on  Mil- 
let, Rousseau,  and  Corot  made  the  same  im- 
pression that  your  work  and  my  relations  with 
you  have  always  made  and  inspired  in  me  to 
do  the  right  and  big  thing."  That  was  the  na- 
ture of  La  Farge's  influence.  He  founded  no 
school.  His  work  was  inimitable  and  he  would 
not  have  imposed  his  style  upon  any  one,  even 
if  he  could  have  done  so.  But  just  as  certain 
of  his  followers  came  to  understand  form  and 
color  the  better  for  his  example  and  teaching, 
so,  I  believe,  these  artists  and  a  generation 
both  of  artists  and  of  laymen  came  insensibly 
to  profit  by  the  largeness  and  rich  substance 


[  230  ] 

of  his  ideas.  His  work  exerted  a  spiritual  force. 
It  refined  taste  and  fostered  imagination.  It 
made  powerfully  for  the  establishment  of  a 
high  ideal.  And  not  only  his  work  as  an  artist 
did  this ;  he  helped  his  time  through  his  per- 
sonality, through  his  talk,  and  through  his  par- 
ticipation in  the  organizing  actions  of  his  fel- 
low artists.  You  did  not  find  LaFarge  on  the 
jury  in  every  exhibition,  but  you  found  him 
working  in  his  quiet  way  for  every  good  cause. 
I  have  mentioned  his  letter  on  McKim.  "  Sud- 
denly one  night,"  he  wrote, "  the  all-powerful 
Daniel  Burnham  dropped  into  the  Century 
from  Chicago,  anxious  to  persuade  McKim, 
whom  he  could  not  wake  or  find.  We  called  on 
Mr.  Cadwalader,who  could  help,  and  Mr.  Mc- 
Kim was  persuaded  to  listen  to  the  plan  of  lay- 
ing out  Washington  according  to  the  ancient 
schemes,  and  also  evidently  new  ones  to  come. 
There  it  was.  And  almost  the  next  day  the 
whole  party  went  down  to  take  hold  of  the 
future.  The  painter,  myself,  dropped  out  later 
because  painters  come  in  afterward  in  the 
modern  methods.  In  the  ancient  ways  they 
were  called  upon  to  make  great  cities,  such 
cities  as  Florence,  but  it  was  a  beautiful  thing 
to  do  and  the  memory  of  this  with  Mr.  Burn- 


[  231  ] 

ham  and  our  dear  Saint-Gaudens  remains."  In 
such  ways  his  devotion  to  the  artistic  welfare 
of  the  country  never  failed.  And  when  he  was 
not  thus  serving  his  period  the  transmission  of 
his  ideas  went  forward  through  his  books. 

There  are  too  many  of  La  Farge's  own 
words  in  this  volume  for  any  minute  exposi- 
tion of  his  purely  literary  traits  to  be  required, 
but  there  are  one  or  two  observations  on  the 
subject  which  may  fairly  be  made.  He  wrote 
as  he  painted  and  drew,  and  as  he  talked  — 
from  the  impulse  toward  self-expression  which 
is  characteristic  of  the  creative  genius.  "There 
is  no  such  thing,"  says  Swinburne,  "as  a  dumb 
poet  or  a  handless  painter.  The  essence  of  an 
artist  is  that  he  should  be  articulate."  For  a 
man  so  naturally  meditative  La  Farge  was  cu- 
riously impelled  to  be  articulate,  to  give  forth 
the  thoughts  constantly  crowding  upon  him, 
and  if  he  could  not  be  making  a  work  of  art  or 
conversing  he  was  apt  to  take  up  the  pen.  He 
was  an  extraordinarily  assiduous  writer  of  let- 
ters. He  enjoyed  writing  them,  and,  by  the 
way,  he  liked  publication.  Alluding  to  a  note 
in  which  he  had  corrected  some  misstatement 
in  a  newspaper,  he  wrote  to  me, "  It  is  amusing 
to  be  in  print  and  I  can  realize  the  joy  of  battle 


of  so  many  in  the  wars  of  the  press."  He  wrote 
with  such  good  will  and  so  voluminously  that 
by  and  by  his  calligraphy  showed  the  strain. 
The  hand,  often  exhausted  with  painting,  could 
scarce  keep  pace  with  the  exhaustless  brain, 
and  although,  even  in  the  last  weeks  of  his  life, 
he  could  with  pen  or  pencil  give  beautiful  form 
to  a  letter  when  he  took  the  time,  for  years  his 
delicate  handwriting  flowed  almost  too  swiftly 
across  the  page  and  was  not  infrequently  diffi- 
cult to  decipher.  Miss  Barnes  has  told  me  of  a 
quaint  episode  due  to  this  illegibility.  He  had 
written  a  letter  to  the  late  J.  Q.  A.  Ward  and, 
on  receiving  a  reply  a  day  or  two  later,  found 
it  impossible  to  make  it  out.  Meanwhile  he 
had  forgotten  just  what  he  had  wanted  to  dis- 
cuss with  his  friend,  but  feeling  vaguely  that 
it  was  something  important  he  contrived  to  get 
a  message  sent  to  Ward  which  brought  him 
to  the  studio.  After  a  little  while  La  Farge 
remarked,  casually,  that  he  had  received  the 
reply  to  his  letter  but  perhaps  it  had  been 
written  in  haste,  and,  in  any  case,  he  could  n't 
quite  get  at  its  contents.  "Oh,"  said  Ward, 
with  a  laugh,  « I  merely  wrote  to  say  that  I 
could  n't  make  out  a  word  of  your  letter! " 
Partly  because  of  the  mere  physical  bother 


E  233  3 

—  and  the  delay — involved  in  writing  clearly, 
and  even  more  because  it  suited  his  tempera- 
ment, La  Farge  took  to  dictation,  and,  in  later 
years  especially,  his  literary  work  as  well  as 
much  of  his  private  correspondence  was  done 
with  the  aid  of  a  stenographer.  The  practice 
was  favorable  to  the*  preservation  of  all  that 
was  most  characteristic  in  his  mental  habit. 
It  made  the  reader  of  a  book  of  his,  or  of  a 
letter,  the  surer  of  his  gleams  of  subtle  sug- 
gestion, of  his  parenthetical  excursions,  of 
his  eloquent  pauses.  In  the  letter  from  which  I 
have  previously  quoted,  Mr.  Adams  says :  — 
"  He  wrote  as  he  talked,  so  that  you  have 
his  conversation  almost  exact  in  his  writings. 
I  used  to  think  that  if  he  were  stenographically 
reported,  we  should  find  only  multiplied  forms 
of  expression.  In  these  he  was,  as  you  know, 
very  abundant,  and  his  choice  of  words  and 
figures  very  amusing,  so  as  to  put  him  among 
the  best  talkers  of  the  time,  if  not  actually  the 
first,  as  I  thought  he  was;  but  the  charm  of 
talk  is  evanescent  and  largely  in  voice  and 
manner.  Except  in  cases  where  a  certain 
forced  brutality  occurs,  as  in  Dr.  Johnson,  or 
in  Whistler,  reports  of  table-talk  are  apt  to 
disappoint;  and  La  Farge's  tones  were  too 


C  234  ] 

shadowy  to  bear  forcing.  I  think  his  letters 
from  Japan  repeat  his  table-talk  much  better 
than  any  memory  could  recall  it." 

Analysis  of  La  Farge  as  a  writer  leads  to 
one  discovery  which  brings  us  sharply  back 
to  his  character  as  a  man.  At  the  outset  of  my 
study  I  glanced  at  his  faculty  for  the  avoid- 
ance of  those  things  which  he  did  not  want  to 
do.  Conversely,  when  La  Farge  wanted  to  do 
a  thing  he  could  do  it,  and  this  fact  is  vividly 
disclosed  by  certain  of  his  writings.  He  was 
wont,  as  Mr.  Adams  says,  to  write  as  he 
talked,  and  accordingly  there  are  pages  of  his 
—  such  as  those,  for  example,  in  his  book  of 
lectures,  "Considerations  on  Painting"  —  in 
which  you  must  follow  him  with  very  great 
care.  His  prose  there  is  close  packed,  some- 
times almost  to  the  point  of  density.  Thought 
treads  fast  upon  the  heels  of  thought,  and  one 
nuance  melts  into  another.  He  is  not  obscure, 
but  he  is  so  full  and  rich  that  one  must  needs 
walk  warily,  for  fear  of  missing  a  subterra- 
nean drift.  On  the  other  hand,  when  La  Farge 
chose  to  be,  I  will  not  say  didactic,  but  the 
more  or  less  practical  narrator,  he  could  make 
his  writing  the  easiest  reading  in  the  world. 
Turn  to  his  book  of  "Great  Masters/'  in 


C  235  ] 

which  he  traverses  the  lives  and  works  of 
Michael  Angelo,  Rembrandt,  Hokusai,  and 
three  or  four  other  commanding  types.  In 
that  book  he  proves  himself  a  vulgarisateur  of 
artistic  knowledge  in  the  best  meaning  of  the 
term,  the  true  colleague  of  those  men  of  taste 
and  learning  who  have  made  the  French  text- 
book a  model.  He  draws  all  the  essential 
threads  of  information  and  of  criticism  into  his 
hands,  and,  while  it  never  occurred  to  him  to 
"write  down  "  to  his  readers,  he  knew  how  so 
to  humanize  his  subject,  how  so  to  clarify  and 
to  simplify  it,  as  to  render  it  delightful  to  the 
least  instructed  layman.  In  a  measure,  I  think, 
this  effect  was  consciously  secured  —  he  knew 
his  task  and  executed  it  with  deliberate  intent. 
But  also  it  is  well  to  note  that  amongst  La 
Farge's  many  and  complex  traits  there  were 
those  of  the  exact  student,  the  conscientious 
and  orderly  thinker.  We  must  remember,  too, 
his  trained  and  tireless  vision.  Nothing  escaped 
him ;  and  if,  as  I  am  always  recalling,  he  made 
unerringly  for  the  thing  that  counted,  it  was 
also  characteristic  of  him  to  give  their  full 
value  to  details  possibly  seeming,  to  some 
eyes,  negligible.  Following  him  upon  his 
travels  in  the  South  Seas  or  in  the  East,  you 


might  take  him  for  a  disciple  of  Taine  in  his 
predilection  for  the  "little  facts"  to  which 
that  philosopher  attached  so  much  importance 
in  the  appraisal  of  a  people.  I  might  illustrate 
this  by  citations  of  his  notes  on  tribal  customs 
and  the  like  in  the  Pacific  islands,  but  that 
would  divert  us  somewhat  from  the  particular 
point  in  hand,  which  is  La  Farge's  technique 
as  a  writer.  For  the  illumination  of  that  I  pre- 
fer to  choose  one  of  those  passages  which  he 
liked  to  affix  to  the  titles  of  his  pictures  in  an 
exhibition  catalogue.  With  one  of  the  loveliest 
of  his  Japanese  paintings,  "The  Fountain  in 
our  Garden  at  Nikko,"  he  used  to  give  this 
extract :  — 

"  We  have  a  little  fountain  in  the  middle  of 
the  garden,  that  gives  the  water  for  our  bath, 
and  sends  a  noisy  stream  rolling  through  the 
wooden  trough  of  the  wash  room.  The  foun- 
tain is  made  by  a  bucket  placed  upon  two  big 
stones,  set  in  a  basin,  along  whose  edge  grow 
the  iris,  still  in  bloom.  A  hidden  pipe  fills  the 
bucket  and  a  long  green  bamboo  makes  a 
conduit  for  the  water  through  the  wooden  side 
of  our  house.  With  another  bamboo  we  tap 
the  water  for  our  bath.  In  the  early  morning 
I  sit  in  the  bathroom  and  paint  this  little  pic- 


C  237  ] 

ture,  through  the  open  side,  while  A.,  upstairs 
in  the  veranda,  is  reading  in  Dante's  <  Para- 
dise '  and  can  see,  when  he  looks  up,  the  great 
temple  roof  of  the  Buddhist  Mangwanji." 

The  number  of  nouns  in  this  brief  descrip- 
tion, and  the  straightforward  manner  in  which 
they  are  made  to  build  up  the  picture,  suggest 
for  a  moment  the  strictly  realistic  writer.  All 
through  his  notes  of  travel  La  Farge  keeps  his 
eye  on  the  object  and  is  meticulously  faithful 
to  its  every  detail.  His  impressions,  essentially 
atmospheric,  rest  upon  the  firmest  of  founda- 
tions. The  passage  just  cited  illustrates  this 
point  and  it  shows,  too,  what  clarity  of  style 
was  accessible  to  him  when  he  was  in  the  mood 
to  secure  it.  Paradoxically,  the  mood  came, 
so  to  say,  at  call,  or,  in  other  words,  he  in- 
stinctively fitted  his  style  to  the  occasion.  It 
was  the  true  envelope  of  his  thought,  subtle 
when  the  latter  took  a  metaphysical  turn,  and 
simplicity  itself  in  a  familiar  record  like  the 
foregoing.  Again  we  think  of  his  possession 
of  "one  of  the  most  perfectly  balanced  judg- 
ments that  could  ever  exist."  It  served  him 
unfailingly,  directed  his  every  touch  and  en- 
abled him  to  regard  every  question  in  the  right 
perspective.  He  had  the  sanity,  which  is  to  say 


C  238  ] 

the  common  sense,  of  genius.  We  may  see  this 
further  operating  in  still  another  phase  of  his 
thought. 

La  Farge's  attitude  toward  the  whole  ques- 
tion of  the  criticism  of  art  was  very  much  that 
of  the  mature  master  who  is  also  a  man  of  the 
world.  Like  every  man  of  genius  he  went  his 
way  untroubled  by  external  admonition;  he 
knew  he  could  trust  the  still  small  voice  of  his 
own  instinct.  But  the  intellectual  nature  of  his 
artistic  habit  made  him  fully  appreciative  of 
the  importance  of  criticism  as  criticism,  and 
he  had  not  the  smallest  trace  of  that  jealousy 
of  the  writing  profession  which  characterizes 
so  many  artists  and  has  its  most  famous  ex- 
emplar in  Whistler.  If  he  realized,  with  that 
gay  dogmatist,  that  art  is  art  and  mathematics 
is  mathematics,  it  did  not  keep  him  from  rec- 
ognizing the  value  of  a  penetrating  thought 
wherever  he  found  it.  He  read  with  intense 
sympathy  what  painters  have  said  about  their 
art,  he  read  Delacroix  and  Fromentin, —  and 
Whistler,  too, — but  then  he  read  everything, 
and  he  would  have  scorned  to  reject  the  sound 
saying  of  a  layman  just  as  he  would  have 
smiled,  as,  indeed,  I  have  known  him  to  smile, 
over  the  naive  hypothesis  that  any  artist,  by  the 


simple  process  of  being  an  artist,  may  brevet 
himself  an  oracle  of  artistic  wisdom.  Such  wis- 
dom draws  its  validity  and  force  from  the  in- 
dividual, and  it  has  a  way  of  cropping  up  in  the 
most  diverse  places.  For  scholarship,  espe- 
cially of  that  scientific  sort  which  has  arisen  in 
the  last  half-century  to  correct  the  wilfulness 
and  steady  the  principles  of  impressionistic 
criticism,  he  had  the  respect  which  he  yielded 
to  every  manifestation  of  honest  thought,  but 
he  did  not  share  in  the  fond  belief  that  there 
is  something  sacrosanct  about  it.  I  have  from 
Brander  Matthews  an  amusing  story  of  La 
Farge  on  our  latter-day  craze  for  the  connois- 
seurship  which  wreaks  itself  on  puzzles  of 
attribution.  They  were  talking  at  the  dinner 
table  about  the  Morellian  hypothesis  and  La 
Farge  said:  — 

"Let  us  suppose  the  testing  of  a  picture  of 
my  own  some  time  many  years  hence.  The 
Morelli  of  the  future  might  look  at  it  narrowly 
and  after  a  while  conclude  that  the  hands  and 
eyes  in  the  picture  showed  a  Japanese  con- 
ception of  form.  He  would  remember  that  I 
had  kept  a  workshop,  a  bottega,  after  the  old 
Italian  fashion,  and  he  would  have  heard  that 
I  had  had  Japanese  people  with  me.  So  he 


[  240  3 

would  say  that  the  picture  was  a  studio  piece, 
the  work  of  a  Japanese  assistant.  Then  the 
Berenson  of  that  day  would  come  along  and 
look  it  all  over  very  carefully  and  get  much 
interested  in  the  spirituality  of  the  face.  He 
would  say  that  there  was  something  very  soft, 
very  feminine,  about  it  and  he  would  wind  up 
by  attributing  it  to  Miss  So-and-So,  another 
pupil.  —  But  it  would  be  a  La  Farge,  all  the 
same." 

He  had  scholarship  himself,  but  he  was  more 
than  modest  about  it,  and,  though  he  did  not 
distrust  his  judgment,  he  was  never  inclined 
to  make  too  much  of  it  or  to  lay  down  the  law. 
He  told  me  of  a  visit  he  once  paid  to  the  house 
of  a  collector  who  possessed  an  antique  head, 
on  which  he  wanted  La  Farge' s  opinion.  In 
examining  the  thing,  he  said,  he  knew  per- 
fectly well  that  he  was  not  bringing  into  play 
the  tremendous  apparatus  of  the  "expert." 
"But,"  he  went  on,  "there  was  something 
about  it.  I  remembered  many  things  that  I  had 
often  seen  abroad  —  and  I  felt  quite  sure  that 
it  was  one  of  those  pieces  of  the  late  eighteenth 
or  early  nineteenth  century,  when  the  sculp- 
tors in  France  were  doing  things  very  like  the 
antique.  Perhaps  some  one  had  just  tried  his 


C  241  3 

hand  at  an  imitation.  I  do  not  know.  But  I  do 
not  think  it  was  really  ancient  Greek."  The 
whole  impression  that  La  Farge  gave  me  in 
this  episode  was  that  of  a  man  who  knew  his 
ground  and  had  his  inner  conviction  but  ab- 
horred flat  assertion  and,  moreover,  was  hum- 
bly willing  to  be  convinced  that  he  was  wrong. 
Vehement  assertion  would  have  jarred  him, 
would  have  wounded  his  sense  of  the  subtle- 
ties of  things  and  of  the  impossibility  of  giving 
to  matters  of  art  the  hard,  fixed  outline  of  mat- 
ters of  fact.  And  "attribution,"  with  a  good 
deal  else  belonging  to  the  great  mass  of  sci- 
entific paraphernalia,  could  not  interest  him 
overlong.  With  his  artist's  passion  for  intrinsic 
beauty  such  things  sank  for  him  more  or  less 
into  the  background.  He  saw  the  peril  they 
involve  of  luring  one  away  from  the  funda- 
mental things  and  of  importing  the  spirit  of 
dissension  into  the  still  air  of  delightful  studies. 
Criticism,  for  him,  was  one  of  the  gentlest  of 
arts,  and  it  was  characteristic  of  him,  by  the 
way,  to  be  most  careful  of  its  use  amongst 
his  contemporaries.  He  could  never  be  per- 
suaded to  criticise  the  works  of  his  fellow  art- 
ists and  I  never  knew  him  to  disparage  one 
of  them. 


n 2^2  n 

His  insistence  upon  the  main  issue,  the 
question  of  sheer  beauty,  regardless  of  the 
origin  of  a  work,  was  manifest  in  his  experi- 
ence as  a  collector.  He  assembled  quantities 
of  works  of  art  in  his  time,  especially  works 
from  the  East,  and  he  bought  them  with 
knowledge,  as  those  familiar  with  his  collec- 
tions well  know ;  but  when  he  acquired  a  thing 
it  was  because  he  found  it  beautiful  and  loved 
it,  and  for  no  other  reason.  In  1908,  when  he 
disposed  of  some  of  his  possessions  at  auction, 
he  wrote  this,  when  it  was  all  over,  to  Mr. 
James  Huneker:  — 

"Let  me  say  that  I  liked  your  reference 
to  my  sale —  to  me  unfortunate —  but  things 
have  sold  badly  and  sales  have  no  souls.  I 
have  never  been  a  collector  for  every  reason 
—  and  one  principal  one  —  that  study  is  not 
in  that  way  —  and  even  influences  one  wants. 
I  went  to  Yamanaka's  a  little  while  ago  with 
two  books  to  ask  their  value.  I  was  told  at 
once  six  or  seven  hundred  dollars  for  one  — 
the  other  none  whatever.  And  yet  the  one 
without  price  was  the  one  I  look  at  occasion- 
ally to  feel  the  breath  of  poetry  blow  free.  But 
it  had  no  duplicate  to  compete  with  it — was 
unknown  to  trade.  Some  of  my  things,  but 


Official  Presentation  of  Gifts  of  Food —  Samoa 


very  few,  I  had  long.  It  is  just  fifty  years  ago 
that  I  bought  my  first  Hokusai  book  —  ima- 
gine the  joy  of  first  discovery.  So  I  lit  off  and 
I  have  had  my  likings  for  Japan.  In  fact,  I 
know  of  no  artists  before  me.  My  French 
people  laughed  at  me  for  <Les  amours  exo- 
tiques/  But  here  people  thought  moral  ill  of  a 
lover  of  Jap  art  —  as  for  the  lover  of  Blake  or 
Goya.  I  think  I  still  have  the  bad  name  — 
tho'  I  parted  with  the  objects,  almost  all,  some 
forty  years  ago." 

He  had  discriminated  from  the  beginning. 
It  was  with  a  critical  mind  that  he  had  made 
his  first  European  travels.  Have  we  not  seen 
how,  even  as  a  lad  in  the  studio  of  Couture, 
he  used  an  exacting  judgment  and  weighed 
his  problems  in  a  delicate  balance  ?  More  and 
more  as  the  years  went  on  he  came  to  rest 
upon  first  principles,  to  go  only  for  that  which 
he  knew  to  be  broad  and  lasting.  His  curi- 
osity was  insatiable.  For  example,  he  de- 
lighted to  tell  how  on  a  visit  to  Venice  he  had 
contrived  to  get  hold  of  a  forger  of  pictures 
and  had  studied  with  him  long  enough  to 
learn  all  the  secrets  of  the  trade.  But  curi- 
osity never  carried  him  off  his  feet,  and  he 
seemed  almost  uncannily  immune  from  those 


I  244  ] 

enthusiasms  which  so  often  disturb  an  artist's 
poise.  More  than  once  in  our  conversations 
some  type  of  decadence  would  come  up.  No- 
thing could  have  been  more  instructive  than 
his  talk  then.  If  the  painter  in  question  had 
any  merits  at  all,  no  matter  how  slight,  La 
Farge  invariably  brought  them  to  the  surface, 
and  not  even  the  worst  sinner  was  carelessly 
or  harshly  dismissed.  But  gently,  and  often 
with  a  kindly  humor,  the  man  would  be  defi- 
nitely put  in  his  place.  You  felt,  when  La 
Farge  had  finished,  that  above  all  things  he 
had  been  just.  I  must  cite  here  some  passages 
from  a  letter  of  his  written  to  Mr.  Adams 
about  Gauguin,  the  "Post-Impressionist," 
whose  sojourn  in  the  South  Seas  predisposed 
La  Farge  to  take  an  interest  in  his  work :  — 

"I  forget  everything  more  and  more.  I 
am  therefore  not  quite  certain  that  you  are 
absolutely  and  entirely  in  the  wrong  about 
that  wild  Frenchman's  being  in  Tahiti.  I 
say  *  wild  Frenchman '  —  I  should  say  stupid 
Frenchman.  I  mean  Gauguin. 

"No,  I  think  that  he  went  there  just  as  we 
arrived  in  Paris  in  1891.  His  pictures  were  on 
show  with  Whistler's  portrait  of  his  mother. 
(You  know  the  people  will  consider,  or  used 


C  245  3 

to  consider  Whistler  as  eccentric.)  I  was  then 
told  that  our  Frenchman  was  going  to  our 
Islands  and  then  Tati  told  me  about  him. 
Very  little  tome;  perhaps  more  to  you.  After 
that  accidentally  I  came  across  some  letters 
of  his,  later  published  in  some  review,  written 
from  Tahiti.  They  were  meant  to  be  expres- 
sive of  a  return  of  the  over-civilized  to  Na- 
ture. They  were  very  foolish  and  probably 
very  much  affected  but  also  naive  and,  I  think, 
truthful.  I  never  remembered  to  get  the  whole 
of  them  —  I  mean  the  letters.  He  described 
his  meeting  some  of  our  ladies,  the  Queen  in- 
cluded, and  some  of  his  quotations  of  con- 
versation were  parlous.  Still  you  know  that 
the  ladies  are  essentially  feminine  and  will  do 

anything  they  d          p  .  Then  there 

were  descriptions  of  sunsets  and  the  water  and 
mountains  and  what  evidently  strikes  even 
such  as  you  and  me. 

"And  he  didn't  like  the  French  of  course, 
and  he  had  no  money  or  little,  or  made  be- 
lieve to  have  little,  and  he  went  into  the  wild- 
erness and  lived  the  simple  life  —  the  cocoa- 
nut  and  bread-fruit  life  —  with  some  relative 
companion  to  charm  the  simplicity  of  food, 
etc.  All  that  seemed  natural  enough ;  stupid 


C  246  ] 

enough;  and  yet  there  was  something  of  the 
man  who  has  found  something. 

"Then  somebody  sent  me  a  catalogue  of 
an  exhibition  of  his. 

"  I  have  no  doubt  that  your  description  of 
the  Frenchman's  paintings,  which  I  under- 
stand you  have  not  seen,  must  be  quite  accu- 
rate if  one  could  be  accurate  about  the  pecu- 
liar shows  which  some  of  those  good  people 
indulge  in.  I  say  indulge  in;  I  mean  that  they 
are  driven  to  do  something  to  attract  atten- 
tion. Even  their  own  attention. 

"I  abandon  this  tedious  subject  to  say  that 
I  had  not  heard  that  Mrs.  Gardner  had  bought 
the  Rembrandt.  ...  I  have  no  objection  any 
more  than  you  to  her  buying  the  Rembrandt 
for  =£30,000,  but  I  wish  instead  that  last  year 
she  had  bought  the  big,  naked  woman  that 
Velasquez  painted.  Or  rather,  no;  I  wish  the 
picture  had  been  bought  for  some  place  here 
where  we  could  see  it  often.  I  saw  it  fifty 
years  ago.  It  was  strangely  wonderful  and 
almost  uninteresting,  but  as  a  good  lesson  for 
students  I  should  have  much  recommended 
it  if  I  remember  rightly ;  and  I  say  this  with 
the  fear  of  Mr.  Comstock  hanging  over  me. 
Certainly  it  was  the  picture  of  a  lady  without 


any  clothes  on  and  I  never  knew  whether  it 
was  prose  or  poetry.  At  any  rate,  it  was  all 
the  more  wonderful,  for  those  good  boys,  the 
Spaniards,  were  so  strict  and  puritanical  about 
painting  anything  in  the  slightest  way  du- 
bious. " 

There  is  something  very  appropriate  to  our 
study  of  La  Farge  about  that  transition  from 
Gauguin  to  Velasquez.  Accidental  enough,  it 
is  still  symbolical  of  his  invariable  return  from 
the  work  that  passes  to  the  work  that  endures. 
And  even  in  the  presence  of  the  masters  he 
maintained  his  clearness  of  judgment,  dis- 
tinguishing between  the  one  essential  thing 
and  all  that  which  might  be  regarded  as  sur- 
plusage. In  the  summer  of  1 906  we  were  both 
abroad  and  he  wrote  to  me  from  Paris,  speak- 
ing of  illness,  but  suggesting  that  we  might 
nevertheless  explore  some  galleries  together. 
The  letter  contains  this  luminous  revelation  of 
his  point  of  view :  — 

"  If  my  eyes  and  the  remainder  of  me  get 
better,  it  would  be  a  pleasure  to  be  with  you 
and  perhaps  even  to  look  at  works  of  art. 
Though  I  must  own  that  as  I  get  older,  I  am 
much  less  curious  about  seeing  anything  new. 
It  is  strange  in  one  way,  but  in  another  I  sup- 


C  248  ] 

pose  that  it  means  that  one  grows  reasonable. 
Our  Japanese  friend  Okakura  wrote  to  me 
once  from  Seville,  where,  as  he  said,  he  was 
listening  to  the  songs  of  the  nightingales  and 
the  cries  of  the  gulls.  He  said  that  he  had  aban- 
doned his  party  of  commissioners  sent  over  by 
the  Japanese  Government;  all  museums,  he 
said,  were  the  same;  all  curators  of  museums 
were  the  same;  he  had  seen  two  hundred 
Rembrandts  and  two  hundred  more  would  not 
teach  him  any  more  about  the  importance  of 
this  very  great  master.  And  I  feel  very  much 
like  our  Japanese  friend.  I  should  almost  pre- 
fer to  see  again  one  of  the  great  paintings,  in 
fact,  I  wish  I  owned  one  for,  let  us  say,  a  week ; 
after  that,  one  might  not  begin  to  look  at  the 
thing.  Whitney  offered  me  once  a  little  Ra- 
phael to  keep  for  a  time,  but  the  idea  of  a  paint- 
ing as  large  as  my  hand  on  my  mantelpiece 
which  had  cost  $150,000  made  me  nervous. 
I  should  have  had  to  put  it  on  my  mantelpiece 
in  that  lower  apartment  of  the  same  house  you 
are  now  in.  All  this  has  its  meaning  which  you 
will  understand/' 

As  it  happened  our  paths  did  not  cross,  but 
when  at  home  again  in  the  fall  he  told  me 
of  his  travels  and  especially  of  his  last  day  in 


[  249  ] 

Paris,  which  he  had  spent  with  his  doctor.  The 
latter  he  described  with  much  interest  as  such 
a  thoroughly  French  type,  a  doctor  first  but 
full  of  intelligence  about  other  things.  He  gave 
a  large  part  of  his  day  to  his  patient  and  they 
spent  some  of  their  time  in  the  Louvre.  La 
Farge  got  a  guide  and  promised  to  pay  him 
five  francs  extra  if  he  would  not  open  his 
mouth  but  would  take  them  straight  to  the 
particular  pictures  that  he,  La  Farge,  remem- 
bered and  wanted  to  see  once  more.  It  was  all 
very  delightful.  It  pleased  him  especially  to 
see  the  Rubenses  again,  in  a  room  that  was 
not  a  gallery  but  really  a  room,  and  he  mused 
over  the  idea  of  a  banquet  given  amongst  those 
glorious  canvasses  with  all  the  guests  in  his- 
toric costume.  The  last  thing  that  he  looked 
at  was  in  the  room  of  the  French  Primitives, 
the  amazing  "Dead  Christ"  from  Avignon. 
As  they  came  out  of  the  building  the  Doctor 
said,  "  Wait,  I  can  tell  you  what  your  emotions 
were  and  how  the  pictures  stirred  you.  I  have 
felt  your  pulse.  It  has  gone  up  according  as 
you  have  been  pleased. "  He  told  La  Farge 
which  pictures  had  affected  him,  and  how,  and 
there  was  no  mistake  in  his  report.  "The  most 
exciting  of  all,"  he  said,  "was  the  'Dead 


C  250  ] 

Christ' —  that  was  a  shock."  "And,"  said  La 
Farge,  "he  was  right." 

There  we  have  the  clairvoyance  of  which  I 
have  spoken,  his  marvellous  sensibility,  the 
man  who,  as  I  have  said,  was  the  artist  pure 
and  simple.  And  yet  here  again  we  must  turn 
back  and  recognize  his  complexity  of  soul, 
noting  how  emotion  was  with  him  saturated 
in  intellect,  how  he  ranged  from  the  world  of 
imagination  to  the  world  of  solid  fact,  and  os- 
cillated between  ideas  of  intangible  beauty  and 
ideas  of  recorded  things.  In  one  of  his  letters 
to  Mr.  Adams  he  speaks  of  a  decoration  upon 
which  he  is  at  work  and  says,  "  I  don't  know 
that  you 'd  like  it.  It  is  frightfully  realistic  — 
as  if  I  had  known  Justinian  and  Trebonian 
quite  well,  just  like  other  people,  which,  of 
course,  is  on  one  side  quite  absurd."  It  was  his 
way,  in  his  work,  to  come  thus  to  close  quar- 
ters with  the  figures  of  the  past.  It  was  the 
same  in  his  dealings  with  literature.  Witness 
these  passages  from  another  letter  to  Mr. 
Adams:  — 

"  I  am  doing  some  reading,  if  I  can  so  call  it. 
I  am  trying  Plutarch  again.  I  am  all  the  time 
astonished  at  my  ignorance  and  loss  of  mem- 
ory with  regard  to  anything.  I  wonder  some- 


[  251  1 

times  how  much  you  keep  of  your  historical 
reading.  By  the  bye,  have  you  ever  seen 
among  those  lovely  letters  of  Henri  IV  one 
addressed  to  his  wife,  Marie  de  Medici,  about 
Plutarch  ?  He  writes  from  on  board  ship.  He 
has  gone  out  from  Havre,  I  think,  being  of- 
fered a  sail  by  the  High  Admiral,  with  some 
little  meaning  to  it  in  the  way  of  armament 
and  war,  and  there  being  little  to  do  he  takes 
a  volume  of  Plutarch,  which  he  likes  to  have 
by  him,  and  which  he  recommends  to  Marie 
—  whether  ironically  or  not,  who  could  guess 
behind  his  smile  of  irony  and  good  nature?  If 
you  can  lay  your  hand  on  the  letter,  do  read 
it ;  I  have  it  not  by  me. 

"  Did  I  ever  tell  you  one  of  my  first  impres- 
sions of  Europe  was  having  in  my  hands  a  lot 
of  Henri  IV  letters  to  an  old  Protestant  com- 
panion in  arms?  You,  of  course,  have  gone 
through  all  that  sort  of  thing,  as  it  were,  by 
ancestral  obligation,  and  the  handwriting  of 
the  illustrious  must  have  been  familiar  to  you 
early." 

With  this  I  must  give  another  fragment 
illustrative  of  La  Farge  as  a  reader,  for  it  is 
also — and  in  this  peculiarly  characteristic — 
illustrative  of  him  as  an  artist.  It  occurs,  again, 
in  a  letter  to  Mr.  Adams :  — 


<<  I  can't  pity  you  for  having  read  all  Plato. 
I've  made  a  shy  at  it  several  times  these  last 
five  or  six  years  and  have  always  come  to 
grief.  Summer  before  last  I  took  up  the  origi- 
nal at  the  beginning  of  the  'Republic/  I  owed 
it  to  Socrates  that  painting  him,  I  should  do 
the  best  I  could  to  be  with  him,  see  something 
of  him.  Besides  you  know  that  he  was  a  sculp- 
tor and  his  talk  is  very  much  like  studio  talk, 
though  better  than  what  I  usually  get  —  to- 
day !  Well,  I  broke  down  on  that  first  Greek 
page.  Of  course  I  knew  all  that  it  meant — 
having  read  it  many  times,  but  I  could  not 
read  it  properly. 

"I  was  reading  it  in  my  son  John's  copy, 
annotated  by  himself.  He  came  in  fresh  from 
Europe,  and  then  he  too  could  not  read  the 
whole  page  right  through.  A  few  years  had 
made  that  difference  to  him  as  a  great  many 
years  had  made  to  me.  I  shall  have  to  try 
Plato  again ;  I  can  always  enjoy  him  by  skip- 
ping, but  to  read  it  right  along  shows  me  that 
I  never  was  meant  to  follow  the  meanderings 
of  philosophers  —  I  mean  the  s}7rstem-makers. 
I  tried  Aristophanes  last  year  and  got  a  good 
deal  out  of  him,  not  all  of  poetry  and  deep  or 
shallow  meaning,  but  also  I  was  tempted  to 


I  253  ] 

understand  a  little  of  the  story  of  ordinary- 
Greek  life.  So  that  I  cannot  pity  you  as  your 
letter  seems  to  require." 

In  the  foregoing  words,  and  in  many  others 
like  them,  La  Farge  has  told  us  in  this  volume 
much  of  his  thought  on  literature  and  on  art. 
Much,  too,  concerning  himself  in  his  work 
has  been  set  forth  in  his  own  language.  One 
question,  as  I  draw  near  to  the  close  of  my 
narrative,  remains  to  be  answered.  What  was 
his  feeling  about  his  career,  about  his  work,  as 
he  looked  back  over  it  all?  I  know  that  it  was 
a  feeling  of  happiness  in  fine  things  achieved, 
of  modest  pride.  A  great  artist  knows  when 
he  has  effectively  put  forth  his  strength.  Old 
age  and  illness  could  not  quench  in  La  Farge 
his  joy  in  his  genius,  his  consciousness  of  the 
beauty  he  had  brought  into  the  world.  But 
throughout  I  have  sought,  wherever  possible, 
to  give  his  own  reflections  on  what  he  had 
done,  and  here,  on  one  of  the  most  interesting 
questions  in  the  study  of  his  character,  I  am 
enabled,  through  the  kindness  of  Mr.  Adams, 
to  cite  from  a  letter  to  him  what  is  in  some 
sort  LaFarge's  artistic  testament:  — 

"As  you  accuse  me,  I  still  retain  an  interest 
in  pictures,  but  not  so  great  as  when  I  had 


C  254  ] 

seen  fewer.  Now  one  can  hardly  escape  them 
in  our  good  city  of  New  York,  as  you  will  see 
when  you  drive  up  Fifth  Avenue. 

"  My  own  pictures  interest  me  somewhat, 
as  you  remark.  Some  day  I  may  do  them  for 
fun  merely.  If  you  remember  your  history 
you  will  remember  that  the  Cat  Princess  on 
retiring  into  private  life  only  killed  mice  for 
fun.  I  kill  my  mice  for  living,  as  she  did  be- 
fore her  great  success.  But  there  is  always 
some  pleasure  in  the  hunt.  .  .  . 

"Perhaps  I  could  answer  that  difficult 
problem  you  have  put  to  me  as  to  whether  it 
would  be  better  to  destroy  everything  we 
ever  did  before  we  go.  .  .  .  One  cannot  judge 
for  others,  exactly,  nor  do  I  think  for  one- 
self very  safely.  ...  As  far  as  my  experience 
goes  I  don't  think  it  is  worth  while. 

"  Summer  before  last  fire  managed  to  burn 
up  my  work  and  Saint-Gaudens's  at  St. 
Thomas's  Church.  So  that  I  had  an  idea  of 
how  I  should  like  to  have  my  work  destroyed. 
In  this  case  I  felt  very  badly  because  it  seemed 
to  me  the  only  large  piece  of  work  —  I  mean 
painting  —  which  I  had  a  chance  of  doing,  and 
which  represented  what  I  thought  I  could  do 
in  the  art  of  painting,  which  is  one  of  con- 


C  255  ] 

tinuous  development;  and  I  had  done  some- 
thing new  which  nobody  else  had  done,  and 
which  I  to-day  would  not  feel  bold  enough  to 
undertake.  Nobody  in  the  future  will  ever 
know  what  I  have  done. 

"The  view  depends  upon  what  we  wish  to 
have  remain  of  ours.  As  Napoleon  said,  <  It  is 
rather  a  poor  immortality/  but  we  cannot 
imagine  ourselves  non-existing.  An  absolute 
cessation  is  most  difficult  to  grasp;  and  yet 
the  Frenchman  wrote :  — 

'  '  Sous  la  tombe  ou  il  dort  que  fait  au  grand  Ho- 
mere, 

Que  son  nom  soit  fameux,  ou  qu'il  ne  le  soit  pas  ? 

"I  sometimes  think  that  I  shall  be,  or  am, 
pleased  at  leaving  some  work  which  has  turned 
the  corner  of  art  in  some  way  and  of  which  I 
feel  confident  as  having  marked  distinctly  a 
character  in  the  arts.  But  even  the  develop- 
ment of  the  art  of  glass  which  I  accomplished 
seemed  to  me  a  small  matter  while  I  did  it,  yet 
I  feel  how  small  it  might  be  compared  to  what 
I  could  do  if,  like  Rodin  or  Chanler,  I  did  not 
have  to  catch  mice  to  eat.  You  remember  that 
when  Whitney  asked  me  to  do  glass  for  him 
and  <do  my  damndest,'  I  told  him  that  he  had 


C  256  ] 

not  money  enough  to  pay  for  what  I  could  do : 
that  I  should  only  do  what  I  thought  was  fairly 
fitting. 

"  From  the  point  of  view  which  may  not 
have  come  up  to  you,  a  religiously  attuned 
mind  might  desire  a  manner  of  destruction  of 
the  ambitions  which  might  appear  too  earthly. 
You  may  remember  that  a  French  sculptor, 
Girardon,  certainly  no  slouch,  was  pleased  to 
think  that  he  had  not  been  a  success.  That,  I 
suppose,  was  a  relic  or  touch  of  Port  Royal.  I 
must  look  him  up ;  I  mean  his  life  and  tradi- 
tions. There  is  no  record  of  Fra  Angelico 
having  destroyed  any  of  his  frescoes  or  other 
pieces  of  work." 

These  reflections,  written  in  1906,  are 
prophetic  in  their  philosophic  calm.  As  his 
strength  diminished  and  illness  recurred  he 
faced  the  inevitable  end  with  an  equable  spirit. 
His  soul's  affairs  were  in  order  and  he  was  con- 
fident of  the  future  lying  in  the  dark.  He  was 
content  and  unafraid.  It  was  a  lesson  in  think- 
ing fortitude  to  see  him,  as  I  did  now  and  then 
in  the  last  year  of  his  life,  and  to  hear  his  still 
courageous  and,  as  always,  gently  humorous 
musings  on  conduct  and  fate.  He  spoke  of 
these  things,  as  for  years  I  had  known  him  to 


[  257  3 

speak  on  everything,  with  wisdom,  with  char- 
ity, and  with  that  keen  but  somehow  detached 
interest  of  his,  the  interest  of  the  artist,  to 
whom  a  problem  of  morals  was  as  stimulating 
and  as  amusing  as  a  problem  in  painting  or 
glass.  And  in  his  personal  applications  of  the 
spiritual  ideas  we  discussed  two  golden  ele- 
ments were  clearly  perceptible,  his  humility 
before  the  Divine  power  and  his  unshakable 
dignity.  He  knew,  as  I  have  stated  early  in  this 
book,  that  he  had  borne  no  malice  toward  any 
of  his  fellow  men,  and,  using  his  unerring  sense 
of  proportion  in  the  contemplation  of  his  own 
career,  he  felt  that  where  he  had  been  faulty 
he  could  meet  the  last  assize  with  a  conscious- 
ness that  the  balance  had  somehow  been  re- 
dressed. Meanwhile,  he  kept  loyally  at  his 
work,  snatching  for  it  every  spark  of  energy 
that  was  left  him.  But  the  burden  was  too 
heavy.  There  came  a  nervous  breakdown  and 
then  great  weakness.  He  was  tired  out.  At 
Providence,  Rhode  Island,  on  Monday,  No- 
vember 14th,  1910,  he  sank  to  rest.  On  the 
following  Thursday,  the  1 7th,  the  funeral  ser- 
vices were  held  at  the  church  of  St.  Francis 
Xavier  in  New  York  and  his  body  was  taken 
to  a  vault  at  Woodlawn. 


C  258  ] 

La  Farge's  mind  was,  in  his  own  phrase, 
" religiously  attuned."  The  fact  is  writ  large 
across  his  work.  It  was  by  a  kind  of  inner  spir- 
itual right  that  he  entered  the  innumerable 
churches  he  decorated.  He  labored  therein 
much  after  the  manner  of  the  mediaeval  crafts- 
man, the  craftsman  of  an  age  of  faith.  I  say 
this,  too,  with  a  full  realization  of  the  fact  that 
not  all  of  the  edifices  he  embellished,  by  any 
means,  belonged  to  his  own  communion.  But 
like  his  old  grandmother,  Madame  Binsse  de 
Saint- Victor,  he  was  indisposed  to  make  much 
of  the  details  of  worship.  For  him  belief  and 
cleanliness  of  soul  were  the  main  things.  He 
could  not  have  been  a  bigot  if  he  had  tried.  His 
respect  for  the  beliefs  of  others  was  illimitable. 
I  remember  his  telling  me  with  much  pictur- 
esque detail  of  his  coming  across  certain  dis- 
creetly veiled  survivals  in  the  South  Seas  of 
the  cult  for  "long  pig,"  and  of  the  social  tra- 
ditions they  still  preserved  amongst  divers 
chiefs  and  their  followers.  Whatever  was  mon- 
strous in  the  subject  was  so  obvious  as  to  be 
taken  for  granted.  La  Farge  could  dispassion- 
ately appreciate,  nevertheless,  the  point  of 
view  of  his  islanders.  He  was  far  from  de- 
liquescing, however,  into  an  attitude  of  ami- 


[  259  2 

able  condonation.  His  intellect  might  range, 
but  his  soul  was  set  upon  a  rock.  And,  more- 
over, from  his  religious  inheritance,  from  the 
training  of  his  childhood  and  youth,  he  never 
wandered.  In  his  generation,  more  perhaps 
than  in  our  own,  the  church  played  its  part 
from  day  to  day  in  a  man's  life.  It  was  not 
separated  in  his  thoughts  from  his  other  in- 
terests but  was  intertwined  with  them  and 
affected  their  development.  I  have  shown  him 
in  his  young  manhood  sympathetically  for- 
gathering with  Paul  de  Saint- Victor  and  his 
rather  pagan  friends,  but  he  was  equally  at 
home  in  very  different  circles.  Recalling  his 
pre-Raphaelite  intimacies  he  told  me  that  he 
immensely  liked  Christina  Rossetti.  She  was  a 
personality,  he  said,  maintaining  that  it  was  as 
she  put  herself  into  her  poetry  that  she  made 
it  interesting.  They  used  to  talk  together  about 
religion,  and,  he  said,  "She  must  have  thought 
me  a  very  spiritual  person.  It  was  odd,  but  I 
could  tell  her  things  she  didn't  know  about 
Romanism,  which  was  blurred  for  her  by  her 
father's  Dantean,  anarchistic  ideas  and  the 
pressure  of  things  English  around  her."  No 
pressure  around  him  could  wean  La  Farge 
from  the  church  into  which  he  was  born.  As 


C  260  3 

his  son,  Father  John,  told  me,  he  died  in  the 
possession  of  a  lively  Christian  faith  —  and  it 
was  the  faith  of  his  fathers. 

It  was  the  faith,  too,  of  that  European  civil- 
ization toward  which  in  so  many  of  the  rela- 
tions of  his  life  he  instinctively  turned,  the 
faith,  through  the  centuries,  of  men  like  him- 
self. "The  man  of  imagination/'  says  Mat- 
thew Arnold,  "  nay,  and  the  philosopher,  too, 
in  spite  of  her  propensity  to  burn  him — will 
always  have  a  weakness  for  the  Catholic 
Church,  because  of  the  rich  treasures  of  hu- 
man life  which  have  been  stored  within  her 
pale."  It  was  through  this  human  power,  as 
through  her  purely  spiritual  authority,  that 
the  Roman  Church  drew  La  Farge  to  her 
bosom,  and  he  found  repose  there,  too,  by 
virtue  of  his  accord  with  historic  tradition. 
When  Velasquez  died  King  Philip  and  his 
courtiers,  paying  tribute  to  him  as  to  a  great 
painter,  paid  tribute  to  him  also  as  to  one  of 
themselves.  They  buried  him  as  a  Knight 
of  the  Order  of  Santiago.  So  it  was  fitting  for 
La  Farge  to  carry  to  his  grave,  affixed  to  his 
coat,  the  insignia  of  the  Legion  of  Honor,  mute 
symbol  of  his  kinship  with  France  and  thereby 
with  the  ancient  order  of  things.  He  was,  in 


C  261  1 

truth,  a  representative  of  that  order,  and  his 
death  may  be  said  to  have  snapped  a  link  be- 
tween the  art  of  America  and  the  art  of  Eu- 
rope in  its  Golden  Age. 

He  was  our  sole  "Old  Master,"  our  sole 
type  of  the  kind  of  genius  that  went  out  with 
the  Italian  Renaissance.  To  say  this  is  no 
disparagement  of  those  other  creative  artists 
whose  names  give  lustre  to  our  annals.  It  is 
simply  to  suggest  his  alliance  with  a  specific 
tradition,  the  tradition  of  men  such  as  Leo- 
nardo and  Raphael.  Like  them  he  was  a  type  of 
intellect  governing  and  coloring  imagination 
and  emotion  and  expressing  itself  with  a  cer- 
tain natural  tendency  toward  the  grand  style. 
Overlaid  upon  this  central  strength  of  his  were 
all  the  riches  of  a  wonderful  personality,  all 
the  traits  of  a  man  whose  feeling  for  the  past 
never  for  a  moment  detached  him  from  the 
current  of  modern  life.  His  was  probably  the 
most  complex  nature  in  our  artistic  history, 
and,  indeed,  he  had  in  this  respect  no  parallel 
among  the  masters  of  his  time  abroad.  And 
every  impulse  of  this  myriad-minded  man  was 
an  impulse  toward  beauty.  That  it  was  which 
gave  value  to  his  work  and  endued  him  with 
an  incomparable  charm. 


C  262  D 

His  fame  is  largely  that  of  a  great  colorist, 
who  made  his  mark  in  monumental  mural 
decorations  and  in  windows  of  stained  glass. 
In  both  these  fields  he  was  wont  to  illustrate 
noble  subjects,  and  the  loftiness  of  his  ideas 
was  also  made  known  through  his  easel  pic- 
tures and  through  his  essays  and  addresses  on 
painting.  He  had  repute  as  a  traveller,  gained 
through  his  enchanting  souvenirs  of  Japan  and 
the  South  Seas.  His  outstanding  character  as 
a  painter  and  as  a  worker  in  glass  has  been 
enriched  and  made  the  more  beguiling  in  the 
public  mind  by  the  sense  of  his  versatility,  of 
the  grace  and  the  originality  with  which  he 
touched  many  interests.  Yet  the  La  Farge  to 
whom  I  would  above  all  pay  tribute  is  the  La 
Farge  who  was,  in  a  sense,  greater  than  all  of 
his  works,  the  La  Farge  who  was,  to  those 
who  knew  him  well,  a  lambent  flame  of  inspi- 
ration. 

There  was  something  Leonardesque  about 
him,  something  of  the  universal  genius.  There 
was  probably  no  subject  of  interest  to  man 
which  was  not  of  interest  to  him.  He  drank 
of  civilization  as  one  drinks  from  a  bubbling 
spring.  He  knew  it  in  those  aspects  which  be- 
long to  antiquity,  through  all  the  long  story 


[  263  3 

which  stretches  down  from  Greece  and  Rome 
and  the  immemorial  East  to  our  own  day  of 
industrialism  and  politics.  Side  by  side  with 
the  mundane  transactions  of  humanity  his 
mind  sought  to  keep  pace  with  the  philoso- 
phies and  religions  of  the  world.  It  was  not 
with  any  pedantry  that  he  assimilated  his 
knowledge  of  these  things  —  or  used  it.  It  was, 
rather,  with  the  ardor  of  a  thinker  having  an 
incurable  zest  for  the  soul's  experience  that 
he  constantly  read  and  thought,  and  read  and 
thought  again,  until  his  intellect  was  a  very 
cosmos  of  sensations.  Out  of  it  poured  his 
paintings  and  his  other  works,  for  he  was  ever 
the  artist,  the  maker,  the  man  who  must  put 
his  ideas  into  tangible  form ;  and  out  of  it  there 
came  also  what  I  can  only  describe  as  a  fer- 
tilizing force,  a  spirit  immanent  in  everything 
that  he  did  and  vivifying  his  unforgettable 
talk,  a  spirit  making  him  a  singular  instance 
of  constructive  power.  When  we  lost  him  we 
lost  a  great  character. 

Finis. 


INDEX 


About,  Edmond,  77. 

Adams,  Henry,  16,  164,  190, 

212,  226,  233,  234,  237,  244, 

250,  251,  253. 
Alma-Tadema,  L.,  37. 
Angelico,  Fra,  108,  256. 
Architectural  League,  the,  224. 
Aristophanes,  252. 
Arnold,  Matthew,  260. 
"Ascension,"  The,  161,  208. 

Baltimore  decorations,  the,  181. 
Balzac,  H.  de,  12,  57,  72. 
Bancroft,  John,  121. 
Barre  de  Nantueil,  Vicomte  de 
la,  46. 

Barnes,  Grace  Edith,  35,  37, 

89,  90,  131,  232. 
Bartholdi,  Auguste,  1 54. 
Barye,  A.  L.,  70,  149. 
Baudelaire,  C,  77. 
Bing,  M.,  193. 
Blake,  William,  138,  243. 
Blanc,  Charles,  69. 
Boccaccio,  52. 
Bode,  Dr.  W.,  38. 
Boissier,  Gaston,  25. 
Bonaparte,  Joseph,  46. 
Booth,  Edwin,  138. 
Bossuet,  56. 
Bough  ton,  G.  H.,  109. 
Brattle  Street  Church,  Boston, 

154. 

Brooks,  Phillips,  158. 
Brown,  Ford  Madox,  137,  187. 
Bullard,  Francis,  188. 
Burne-Jones,  E.,  87,  186. 
Burnham,  D.  H.,  230. 


Byron,  Lord,  31,  57. 

Cadwalader,  J.  L.,  230. 
Cellini,  218. 
Chanler,  R.,  255. 
Chasse'riau,  Th.,  84,  104. 
Chavannes,  Puvis  de,  2  5, 85, 93, 
96. 

Chevreul,  M.  E.,  87. 
Confucius,  181. 

Congregational  Church,  New- 
port, 220. 

Conway,  Sir  M.,  86. 

Corday,  Charlotte,  80. 

Corneille,  57. 

Corot,  J.  B.  C,  128,  229. 

Courier,  Paul  Louis,  57. 

Couture,  T.,  89,  91,  93, 96,  1 10, 
117,  243. 

David,  J.  L.,  82. 

Delacroix,  E.,  31,  85,  96,  100, 

104, 149,  186,  238. 
Derby,  Dr.  R.  H.,  188,  195. 
Dewing,  Maria  Oakey,  133. 
Donald,  Dr.  E.  W.,  162,  227. 
Diaz,  N.,  70. 
Du  Fais,  John,  159. 
Duff,  Sir  M.  E.  Grant,  77. 
Dupre*,  J.,  104. 
Durand-Ruel,  M.,  185. 
Durer,  69. 

Fantin-Latour,  H.,  133. 
Fdlix,  Lia,  76. 
Flaubert,  G.,  77,  134. 
France,  Anatole,  25,  100, 134. 
Fromentin,  E.,  238. 


I  266  1 


Gambrill,  Richard,  109. 
Gardner,  Mrs.  John  L.,  115, 
246. 

Gauguin,  P.,  244,  247. 
Gautier,  Th.,  77, 83. 
Gavarni,  77,  100. 
Gebhart,  E.,  25. 
Ge'rome,  J.  L.,  84. 
Gilbert,  Cass,  172. 
Girardon,  F.,  256. 
Goncourts,  the,  75. 
Goya,  F.,  243. 
Grandville,  J.,  56. 
Grenier,  E.,  78. 
Guenn,  P.  N.,  82. 
Guerrier,  General,  43. 
Guilbert,  Melanie,  80. 

Hecker,  Father,  120. 
Heine,  H.,  72, 136. 
Henri  IV,  41,  251. 
Henri  V,  57. 
Hobbes,  John  Oliver,  3. 
Hokusai,  235. 
Homer,  56. 

Homer,  Winslow,  70,  183. 
Houghton,  Mr.,  138. 
Hugo,  Victor,  77. 
Huneker,  James,  242. 
HungAi,  143. 
Hunt,  R.  M.,  109, 153. 
Hunt,  W.  M.,96,  no,  119, 132, 
158. 

Huysmans,  J.  K.,  33. 
"  Hynerotomachia  Poliphili," 
188. 

Incarnation,  Church  of  the, 

New  York,  160. 
Ingres,  J.  A.  D.,  82,  84,  100, 

104. 

Inness,  George,  71. 


James,  Henry,  35,  117. 
James,  William,  117. 
Johannot,  Tony,  57. 
Johnson,  Dr.,  37,  233. 
Johnston,  Humphreys,  19. 
Joncquiere,  J.  de,  41. 
Josephine,  Empress,  57. 
Jo wett,  Benjamin,  176. 

Kaiser,  the,  37. 
Keats,  John,  207. 
King,  Clarence,  26,  198. 

LaFarge,  Father  John,  252, 
260. 

La  Farge,  J.  F.  de,  43,  52,  57, 

73>  79>  9°,  97- 

La  Farge,  Mrs.  Margaret  Ma- 
son Perry,  120. 

La  Fontaine,  52. 

Lamartine,  74,  78. 

Landor,  W.  S.,  40. 

"  Last  Valley,  The,"  186. 

Lathrop,  Francis,  159. 

Le  Bon,  G.,  221. 

Leclerc,  General,  43. 

Lemoyne,  J.  B.,  63. 

Leonardo,  261. 

Lever,  Charles,  60. 

Loti,  Pierre,  25. 

Low,  A.  A.,  122. 

Luther,  53. 

Maistre,  J.  M.,  de,  80,  81. 
Mantegna,  24. 
Marat,  80. 
Maroncelli,  59. 
Martin,  Homer,  71. 
Matthews,  Brander,  239. 
May,  Edward,  91. 
Maynard,  G.  W.,  32,  159. 
Mazzini,  60. 


McKim,  C.  F.,  188,  225,  230. 
McKim,  Mead  &  White,  224. 
Medici,  Marie  de,  251. 
Michael  Angelo,  36,  210,  225, 
235- 

Millet,  J.  F.,  84,  96,  in,  116, 
229. 

Millet,  F.  D.,  159. 
Mocquard,  J.  F.,  76. 
Moliere,  57. 
Monet,  C,  185. 
Moreau,  G.,  85,  210. 
Musset,  A.  de,  72. 

Nadar,  74. 

Napoleon  I,  53,  57,  60,  255. 
Napoleon  III,  60,  155. 
Newman,  Cardinal,  68. 
Normanby,  Marquis  of,  40. 
Norton,  C.  E.,  188. 

Okakura,  18,  22,  103,  124,  166, 
181,  248. 

"Paradise  Valley,"  the,  122, 
127,  129,  132,  156,  208. 

"  Peacock  Window,"  the,  199, 
208. 

Pellico,  Silvio,  59. 

Piombo,  Sebastiano  del,  64. 

Pisanello,  24. 

Plato,  175,252. 

Plutarch,  250. 

Post,  G.  B.,  109,  152. 

Rachel,  45,  76. 
Racine,  57. 

Raphael,  75,  107,  248,  261. 
Reid  Music  Room,  the,  161. 
Reinach,  Salomon,  25. 
Rembrandt,  94,  108,  124,  235, 
246. 


Renan,  Ary,  183. 
Renan,  E.,  25,  77. 
Richardson,  H.  H.,  152. 
Rimmer,  Dr.  W.,  142. 
Rochambeau,  Admiral,  65. 
Rodin,  Auguste,  38,  149,  255. 
Rome,  King  of,  57. 
Rosa,  Salvator,  63, 
Rose,  G.  L.,  1 59. 
Rossetti,  Christina,  259. 
Rossetti,  D.  G.,  38,  137,  186. 
Rossetti,  W.  M.,  137. 
Rousseau,  Th.,  96,  118,  128, 

186,  229. 
Rubens,  95,  98. 
Ruskin,  J.,  68,  72,  82,  86. 
Ruysdael,  S.,  64. 

Sainte-Beuve,  C.  A.,  77. 
Saint-Gaudens,  Augustus,  20, 

22,  32,  162,  204,  229,  231, 

254. 

St.  Paul  decorations,  the,  138, 
172. 

St.  Thomas's   Church,  New 

York,  160,  204,  229,  254. 
Saint-Victor,  Binsse  de,  44,  50, 

56,  62,  64. 
Saint-Victor,  Madame  Binsse 

de,  50,  58,  258. 
Saint- Victor,  J.  B.  de,  50,  79, 

86. 

Saint-Victor,  Paul  de,  50,  74, 

83,  86,  126,  259. 
Sand,  George,  134. 
Sargent,  J.  S.,  157. 
Scudder,  Horace,  137. 
Smith,  S.  L.,  159. 
Socrates,  14,  252. 
Stendhal,  80. 
Stevens,  Alfred,  144. 
Stillman,  W.  J.,  109. 


C  268  1 


Strange,  Henry  Le,  89. 
Sturgis,  Russell,  29. 
Swinburne,  A.  C,  231. 

Taine,  H.,  236. 
Ticknor  and  Fields,  137. 
Tintoretto,  210. 
Titian,  36,  98,  210. 
Toussaint,  43. 

Trinity  Church,  Boston,  153, 

156,  228. 
Troyon,  C,  70. 
Turner,  J.  M.  W.,  57,  72. 

Uchard,  Mario,  77. 

Van  Brunt,  H.,  109,  186. 
Vanderbilt  house,  the,  204. 
Van  Home,  Sir  W.,  115. 
Vedder,  Elihu,  132. 


Velasquez,  98,  107,  246,  247, 

260. 
Vernet,  H.,  63. 
Victoria,  Queen,  154. 
Viollet-le-Duc,  88,  153. 
Voltaire,  56,  57. 

Ward,  J.  Q.  A.,  232. 
Ware,  William,  109,  186. 
Watson   Memorial  Window, 

the,  183. 
Watteau,  161. 
Watts,  G.  F.,  210. 
Wellington,  Duke  of,  220. 
Whistler,  13,  19,  31,  123,  136, 

207,  233,  238,  244. 
White,  Stanford,  117,  163,  224. 
Whitney,  W.  C,  143,  248,  255. 
"Wolf  Charmer,  The,"  139, 142. 
Wormeley,  Miss  K.  P.,  12. 


CAMBRIDGE  .  MASSACHUSETTS 
U  .  S  .  A 


GETTY  RESEARCH  INSTITUTE 
3  3125  01360  4638 


